Wiktionary:Tea room

Wiktionary > Discussion rooms > Tea room

WT:TR redirects here. For guidelines on translations, see Wiktionary:Translations

Click here to start a new Tea room discussion.

Wiktionary discussion rooms (edit) see also: requests

Information desk start a new discussion | this month | archives Newcomers’ questions, minor problems, specific requests for information or assistance.

Tea room start a new discussion | this month | archives Questions and discussions about specific words.

Etymology scriptorium start a new discussion | this month | archives Questions and discussions about etymology—the historical development of words.

Beer parlour start a new discussion | this month | archives General policy discussions and proposals, requests for permissions and major announcements.

Grease pit start a new discussion | this month | archives Technical questions, requests and discussions.

All Wiktionary: namespace discussions 1 2 3 4 5 – All discussion pages 1 2 3 4 5

A place to ask for help on finding quotations, etymologies, or other information about particular words. The Tea room is named to accompany the Beer parlour.

For questions about the general Wiktionary policies, use the Beer parlour; for technical questions, use the Grease pit. For questions about specific content, you're in the right place.

Tea room archives edit
2025 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2024 January February March April May June July August September October November December
Earlier years 2023 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2022 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2021 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2020 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2019 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2018 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2017 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2016 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2015 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2014 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2013 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2012 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2011 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2010 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2009 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2008 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2007 January February March April May June July August September October November December 2006 2005 2004 2003

Please do not edit section titles as this breaks links on talk pages and in other discussion fora.

Oldest tagged RFTs

• Sukhumi
  regnbuefamilie
  Euthemia
  hagdon
  lipsati
  Wesson
  monolid
  watercressing
  notch
  address
  carhouse
  RGSS
  series
  multivarious
  amen
  -stan
  червь
  چھہ
  half
  based
  orignal
  dies Mercurii
  manso
  ၐြဳ
  ကာလယဲ
  pasar por las horcas caudinas
  monosemic
  hazelly
  Dağ Türkleri
  Aster
  smeť
  over skyerne er himlen altid blå
  rumped
  Indon
  belly dance
  on purpose
  nasal cavity
  how much
  take its toll
  bok choy
  search up
  don't try to teach grandma how to suck eggs
  speech recognition
  turn the tide
  ne bis in idem
  cornus
  code point
  one over the eight
  green privilege
  Chinese landing
  one's house in order
  native bread
  rhina
  one's heart bleeds
  gender-neutral
  chicken-or-egg question
  otocrane
  Surinam
  no thank you
  mukt
  uninvited
  away
  catalogue
  imaginary
  tweener
  radiendocrinology
  classique
  be
  smuggling raisins
  shadowing
  mandate
  war hero
  war-hero
  eat like a horse
  tacet
  lightning bruiser
  phrogging
  tjälknöl
  efilism
  Jacboson
  Andersdr
  berm
  pirmas
  arena rock
  rayon
  on someone's ass
  caviar to the general
  churtle
  Lipović
  -to
  sum of its parts
  joke
  dunnarf
  Єфінгар
  Ефингар
  初次見面
  unprovenienced
  Bereshit
  α΄
  

January 2025

Pseudo-subsense at England needs work

As I write this, at England, there is a pseudo-subsense that isn't entered formally as a subsense (##) and is rather opaquely written. It needs work to become less opaque and to show plainly why it is (allegedly) different from sense 1, which is Q21. Apparently the intended distinction is the succession of states versus the whole superset of territories that have been controlled by any of those. If so, OK, but it needs some cleanup. Quercus solaris (talk) 05:05, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

@LlywelynII, Who added what is now the main sense, with a wordier version of the definition that was already there left at the end with only a semicolon as separation (diff). It looks like an attempt to distinguish the states from the region occupied by them. The result was only slightly smaller than its referent, so someone decided later to split it up. Chuck Entz (talk) 08:06, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm surprised how little understanding of the English language there is in this tea-room. Looking at lie back and think of England, the definition says "to accept unwanted sex due to social pressures". This is not the meaning. Traditionally in England, there was no "unwanted sex due to social pressures", as extra-marital sex was frowned upon. The meaning is this: that a woman should not enjoy sex. In the 19th century, women were told to think of something else or pretend it wasn't happening and not to enjoy the orgasm. It wasn't "unwanted sex", but marital sex during which the women were to think of England, in order to avoid enjoying it like sluts. That was the attitude then anyway.

Under England, you say the use of England to refer as a pars pro toto to the UK is "proscribed, sometimes offensive". This use of "proscribed" on Wiktionary is odd - it has a haughty tone, as if you think you have the right to "forbid" some usages. In fact, Nancy Mitford in her famous Nobless Oblige refers to England as the U-form of the non-U Britain. 2A00:23C7:1D84:FE01:58B6:75D0:328A:E5EC 11:42, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

I think it’s useful to describe certain terms as ‘sometimes offensive’ as in many cases such as this it’s only the easily offended who object. It’s a similar situation to chinky meaning a Chinese meal or restaurant which is far less offensive than calling a Chinese person a ‘chinky’ and was previously labelled as ‘sometimes offensive’ before that label was amended. Overlordnat1 (talk) 12:55, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

Ah yes, I see. I'm not familiar with a Chinese person called a "chinky". I've heard a Chinese person referred to as a "chink", with no -y. By the way, the word chink was mainly used in my childhood to refer to a certain type of marble (glass balls used in children's games), but Wiktionary doesn't have this. In fact, I can't find a picture of a chink in that sense on the Internet. it was normally a white one with a flash of colour in the middle (possibly seen as equivalent to a narrow eye supposedly of a Chinese person? that may have been the derivation). 2A00:23C7:1D84:FE01:F65:D78F:9DE3:1B82 21:15, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

I thought you meant the Wiktionary definition had been amended to remove the claim that chinky, in reference to Chinese takeaway food, was "sometimes offensive" as the vast majority of people in England will tell you it's not offensive at all. Now I see it has been amended to say "offensive" as if it were definitely offensive. The Far Left seem in total control of Wiktionary. 2A00:23C7:1D84:FE01:F65:D78F:9DE3:1B82 21:18, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

How do the Chinese people in Britain feel about the word? Do they find it offensive or not? CitationsFreak (talk) 04:59, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Why does it matter how Chinese people "feel" about the word? It is our country, and the majority population can easily explain to them that no offence is meant. And if they're in our country, they have to adapt to us and not the other way round. The Far Left have spent decades encouraging minorities to be "chippy" - with great success. Minorities who are constantly hunting for offence should be shown the door. We need to state quite baldly to the Chinese: if you carry on with this, be gone! It's that simple. In fact, not all the Chinese do buy into this offence-hunting, so your own ethnic contempt for the Chinese is revealed here. When I lived in China for four years, I found many Americans - Americans in particular - were very insistent that the non-offensive term for foreigners, laowai, was offensive. Americans are taught to hunt for offence - but the term is not offensive in any way. We need to start telling the Far Left STOP PREACHING. 2A00:23C7:1D84:FE01:F65:D78F:9DE3:1B82 16:02, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

Heh. I feel the need to remark that this Londoner is not me. ~ Eq. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:C54E:F82E:FAA1:E7A5 16:08, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

Seems to barely need pointing out, but amid the series of mistaken claims and concepts in the above rant—of course—the bit about Chinese is entirely mistaken as well. The nonoffensive term for foreigners is waiguoren; laowai is specifically a somewhat depreciatory term for foreigners (typically European) who could never be taken for Chinese as opposed to Japanese, Koreans, etc. Usage tag restored at its entry; see also its inclusion at List of ethnic slurs. @CitationsFreak Similarly, the OED (whose staff presumably includes a few non-Americans) lists both the adj. and n. senses of 'chinky' as usually offensive. Why wouldn't they be? Of course the usage for 'Chinese restaurant' came directly from the slur for Chinese people. — LlywelynII 12:06, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

The sitcom Peep Show has a bit about "chinky" (the takeaway sense) which may be instructive! 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:6C72:82A7:8821:35AA 05:03, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Or, potentially still more informative, Nigel Farage vs Peep Show on 'Chinky'. — LlywelynII 12:16, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

The use of England to describe the United Kingdom should have a note of (proscribed) not because we think it's offensive or wrong but because many native speakers of the English language (particularly American geography teachers and the Scottish) find it entirely mistaken in the manner of Holland for the Netherlands or Russia for the Soviet Union. It's descriptive of the reception, not prescriptivist on our part. — LlywelynII 12:25, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘I have thought some more about the "historically-shifting-set-of-territories-since-eons-before-the-900s" subsense for England, and I retract half of my miffiness about it, albeit not all. I guess it isn't that badly written, really, although some improvement could help non-British people see at a glance where the boundary differences would lie, especially regarding Cornwall. One of the complexities about it, and the reason why I started this thread, is that I (as a non-British person) came across usage in which Cornwall is treated as comeronymous with England (under holonym UK) but not meronymous to England. It was thus spoken of in the same way as Wales would be. Example: "Cornwall is west of England" as opposed to "Cornwall is west of the rest of England". I guess if one is speaking in the "historically-shifting-set-of-territories-since-eons-before-the-900s" subsense of England, that's fair enough (e.g., "Cornwall is the country of the Cornish, and England is the country of the English, and they're two different countries"), but it sounds secessionist to an untrained ear of a non-British person reading modern utterances. Can any Brits here explain whether (1) such usage is tendentious (like do fiery Cornish nationalists say it and then Unionists get angry about it) or (2) such usage is just idiomatically normal and no one thinks twice about it because they know that the words England and England mean different things contextually, and you can thus speak this way even if you are a staunch Unionist and certainly mean no secessionism by it? If this is a political powderkeg, I don't mean to start any brawls about it and will bugger off about it. I just know that I am far from the only non-British person who would need to ask such questions. Quercus solaris (talk) 07:12, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

In a modern context, "Cornwall is west of England" is "obviously wrong" to me, and, I would assume, to most English people, because Cornwall is part of England. It could only be said humorously, or if seriously then pointedly, e.g. by someone who believes in Cornish independence, or strongly believes that Cornwall is "different" from the rest of England. Even then it sounds far-fetched and counterfactual. On the subject of the two senses that you mentioned at the top of the thread, I would have thought that, at any given point in history at which "England" was defined at all, "England" would refer to the area that "England" covered at that time, simple as. I'm not aware of any different "generally" sense, certainly not in modern times. I wonder whether the "generally" sense might be referring to anachronistic or unhistorical uses, such as the projection of modern boundaries onto historical times, e.g. "The Romans had to fight for many years before they controlled all of England" (examples such as this are easy to find). Mihia (talk) 16:13, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, your reply is helpful. I might (maybe) try to simplify the subsense there — something like "the territory of the Angles in Britain at any given time before the founding of the Kingdom of England, or the territory of the English people at any given time, in either the Kingdom of England or the United Kingdom." As for modern usage, (1) I think the usage (by a Brit) that I encountered might well have been provocatively odd, and (2) this discussion reminds me of the legal reform of 1967 whereby if you mean England and Wales then you should say England and Wales instead of just England. But of course a vast difference is that Cornwall became a County of England eons ago whereas Wales never did. Lastly, some Brits might be annoyed and say to someone like me, "go learn more history." Fair enough, but even so, it's good for dictionaries to give short, simple defs of word senses that even foreigners can easily use — ones that are admittedly mere thumbnails and yet still entirely accurate. Quercus solaris (talk) 20:17, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Well, historically Cornwall was the last county to be incorporated into England under King Athelstan, and they kept up their language until about 1800 (it survives only as a conlang today). So there are historical reasons for citing Cornwall as separate. See also the situation re: Wales and Berwick-upon-Tweed, not seen as fully part of England until an Act of Parliament in the 1700s specified that England referred to Wales and Berwick. (Wales is not regarded as part of England today, but that is a modern development of the issue.) 2A00:23C7:1D84:FE01:F65:D78F:9DE3:1B82 16:06, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

close (adj) (2)

We had an over-extended and under-exampled definition, "Accurate; careful; precise; also, attentive; undeviating; strict", which I am trying to break down, or pin down, and furnish with examples. Currently left orphaned is "accurate/precise". Can anyone come up with examples (in particular, modern examples) of this? Not to be confused with the use as in "close match", which is essentially abstract "near", and is covered elsewhere. This "accurate/precise" sense ought to be related, I suppose, somehow, to the other words in the original wide-ranging definition. Also not to be confused with "careful, detailed" as in "a close reading", which has a separate definition -- although, of course, definitions could be recombined if it seems sensible after all. Any ideas? Mihia (talk) 19:35, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

ageism

There's been a discussion on Discord and at WT:RFDE#ageism about whether or not the primary definition should include "especially old people". My argument is that it puts us in line with various definitions and usages of ageism including: MW; OED "...esp. against elderly people."; Dictionary.com, albeit in a second sense; The American Psychological Association; Wikipedia; NIH; the U.S. Age Discrimination Act references 40+; and the Canadian Gov. To be clear, ageism does affect younger people, but my point is that the average person uses ageism to reference discrimination and prejudice against older people much much more. Nonetheless, on Discord, it was argued by @MedK1 that in their experience, they see it more often "in reference to minors, calling stuff like saying "minors shouldn't be on Twitter", dismissing a kid's opinion or treating a 19-year-old in a restaurant like a dependent as ageism". I've personally never seen referred to "ageism", and I doubt that it would be by folks my age and up (mid-twenties), but I would like to get the opinions of other folks here as well. If the former case can be cited, I would think it'd be a subsense rather than altering the primary sense.

The question is if there's a consensus to include the phrasing or not, especially since it affects the aforementioned RFD. CC other participants in the discussions: @CitationsFreak, @Soap, @Polomo47, @Mihia, @LunaEatsTuna, @Surjection, @P Aculeius, @Hftf, @Theknightwho. AG202 (talk) 23:21, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

Hftf also stated:

fwiw in more than 9 times in 10 i (personally) hear "ageism" used, it's referring to discrimination against "the relatively older" (and not "the elderly") - example: (even experienced) 35 year olds seem less desirable for faangs/startups to hire than 22 year olds (because of their life responsibilities, having less "potential"/"energy" in keeping up with shiny new toy syndrome, etc), but i follow tech news and not youth spaces on social media. i suspect that the places one frequents are going to strongly affect the way you experience the word "ageism" being used. to verify my experience you can search [Google Search for Hackernews] etc

which I personally have heard, but I still think that can fall under our current def. AG202 (talk) 23:27, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

I think it's reasonable to note that older people (I wouldn't call people in their 40's, 50's, or 60's "elderly") are the primary focus of ageism, though it can be directed at younger people too. P Aculeius (talk) 23:41, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

I agree with the cited refs, and nonetheless perhaps the best solution for Wiktionary is to take the part conveying the idea of "often said of people viewed as either of a certain age or older adults" (or words to that effect) and make it either (1) an {{ngd}} that follows the def, or (2) a usage note. I think this would address the concern of someone who didn't like the "especially" part in this instance. And I think the words "often said of" are good because they can prevent any quibbling about "especially" or "usually" in this instance. I agree with the cited refs that, at least before the 2020s, most discussions of ageism have concerned discriminating against people viewed as "too old" for something, according to a bias. In the United States it has often been about the fact that companies avoid hiring people in their 50s and 60s, whether because they think the olds (1) can't use tech well, (2) will bog down the company's [carrier-administered but self-funded] health insurance by needing too much health care (what a nerve people have, actually needing health care), or (3) are asking for a higher salary than younger applicants. Quercus solaris (talk) 00:27, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

That's just saying the exact same thing as the current inadequate definition but with different words. It doesn't help anything. MedK1 (talk) 00:57, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

My main problem isn't that the definition mentions older people, but that it frames the use pertaining to prejudice against younger people as marginal or rare. MedK1 (talk) 01:01, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

No, saying "often X" doesn't portray Y as either marginal or rare. That's a misreading. Quercus solaris (talk) 01:22, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

...you mean to tell me you don't at all see how removing the mention of young people from the definition can carry the implication that said use is less relevant or widespread than the other one? If they're both especially notable, it stands to reason that both be mentioned. To not mention both of them is to imply they're not, in fact, both notable. MedK1 (talk) 04:19, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Agreed with Solar Oak. Noting the particular association of ageism with the elderly is not the same as suggesting that any other forms are rare, much less "marginal". P Aculeius (talk) 03:12, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

I'd also like to add that in my opinion, the best definition we've had was the one just before this change, which was made during a RfD discussion for a different sense of the word, and agreed on between only two users. The definition was perfectly fine before, and I believe the change was for the worse. If my edit was reverted on the basis that more talk was warranted, surely the same should go for the other one as well? MedK1 (talk) 00:57, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

I'll have to disagree with you there: "especially youth or seniors" implies that young people are particularly vulnerable to discrimination based on age—and I doubt that's what most people consider age-based discrimination, if we filter out legal disabilities imposed on minors, which are usually not included. The terms are also not parallel: "seniors" is a slangy way of referring to older people; "old people" is an improvement on that. If you disagree, you're welcome to bring that up on the entry's talk page—but that's not the subject of this discussion, which is whether the words "especially old people" or other words of similar effect are warranted, not whether the choice of "old people" vs. "seniors" or some other word or phrase of choice is the best alternative. Bringing it up here simply confuses the issue. P Aculeius (talk) 03:11, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

As is often the case, citations would help, though it is likely tedious to find the relevant information that establishes the age of the target of ageism and the age of the ageist. DCDuring (talk) 03:58, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Very true. MedK1 (talk) 04:13, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

I have no opinion on old people vs elderly vs seniors vs whatever-have-you. AG brought the discussion here to the Tea room after I went to the Discord to talk about how I don't agree with removing the mentions relating to bigotry against young people. That is what it's about.

I don't care how we refer to older people — that's too nitpicky even for me —, I care that we've removed "young people" from the definition for little reason and thereby a) made it less neutral and most importantly b) made it emphasize a usage that I haven't often come across in the wild, to the detriment of particular also-common usecases. MedK1 (talk) 04:12, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

"Discrimination against young people" is still included in the definition; it just emphasizes that the most common usage uses the word when referring to discrimination against older people. AG202 (talk) 05:21, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

To restate what i said on Discord .... i think we should opt for a neutrally worded definition, as we do with both racism and sexual harassment. 95% of sexual harassment is men acting on women, but when women do it to men, it's still sexual harassment just as much, and therefore the definition needs no further specification. I do want to add though that I see the other side of the argument and I think it's ultimately an argument over what we should base our entries on. Im not saying AG202 is wrong, just that I think we should follow the model set by the entries I've named above. —Soap— 11:52, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

I think age and, especially, aged are different from race and gender/sex in that it is more likely when unmodified to be used about the old rather than the young. So 'neutral' wording is somewhat misleading. I think that it should be unsurprising that ageism is more often used about discrimination against the old rather than the young. Therefore, it seems to me appropriate that there be an "especially"-type phrase in the definition to note this. DCDuring (talk) 15:38, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

• I'm quite happy with wording along the lines of "especially the old" because I believe that in practice the word is very predominantly (you could almost say overwhelmingly) used that way. Sometimes it is even defined just as that, e.g. "Ageism is defined as discrimination against older people because of negative and inaccurate stereotypes" [1], and there seem to be entire books on the subject of "ageism" that take it as given that it means discrimination against old people. Having said that, I wouldn't mind if we changed the definition to "especially older people". As someone else may have said somewhere, it can affect, say, people in middle age, who wouldn't necessarily think of themselves as "old". Mihia (talk) 19:46, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

• On another point, at one time the wording was:

a) The treating of a person or people, especially old people, differently from others based on assumptions, prejudices or/and stereotypes relating to their age.

Now it has somehow become:

b) The treating of a person or people differently, especially old people, from others based on assumptions, prejudices or/and stereotypes relating to their age.

To me, (a) reads better and I propose that we put it back that way. Mihia (talk) 19:46, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

That was my bad, I'll fix it now AG202 (talk) 19:49, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. Mihia (talk) 20:11, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

• I have changed "old people" to "older people" per my above comment. If anyone definitely disagrees with this, please put it back. Mihia (talk) 21:09, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

meat assault

I put some cites here. But should I create an entry (is this idiomatic?), or is the relevant sense of meat used outside of this phrase often enough that it should be at meat instead? - -sche (discuss) 04:42, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

I would consider it idiomatic. I think in Russian they say "meat" for "cannon fodder", which doesn't seem very common in English. At any rate the term is surely a calque from Russian/Ukrainian, though I don't know the original form(s). The English equivalent seems to be "human wave attack". The term "meat assault" in English is of course used mainly as an anti-Russian propaganda term, which your quotes also show. (For what it's worth, the Russians did use such tactics at Bakhmut for example, where it was Wagner's convicts fighting. The Ukrainians used them in their failed summer offensive of 2023. But all in all both sides are trying hard to minimize casualties.) 92.73.31.113 05:13, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm inclined to believe that meat needs a definition that encompasses meat machine/assault/computer and whatever other collocations seem to use the sense. "Meat machine" goes back at least to a reported conversation with Nikola Tesla and is common in philosophical and cognitive-science writings about AI. Also meat robot/meat automaton. DCDuring (talk) 20:55, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

charbon

The pronunciation of the English word is unattested and does not match that given in the OED. — Paul G (talk) 07:13, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Queries about pronunciation

What is the difference, if any, between the pronunciation of /ˈspɹɪŋklə/ and /-ˈsprɪŋkl̩ə/? I see them and other words listed as alternative pronunciations on the OED, so I assume they must be different. I hope that someone can shed light on this for my edification. Thanks! — Sgconlaw (talk) 11:17, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

The syllabic l is a whole syllable of its own. Sprin -kler is two syllables. Sprin kl er is three syllables. You could say there is a slight fleeting vowel before the sylllabic l. 2A00:23C7:1D84:FE01:F65:D78F:9DE3:1B82 16:09, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

This. You can think of the latter as being actually 'sprinkle' and then the -er ending, too. Have a recording if it helps! MedK1 (talk) 05:25, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! — Sgconlaw (talk) 05:33, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @MedK1: here is a trickier one: unravel—are /(ˌ)ʌnˈɹævl/ and /(ˌ)ʌnˈɹævl̩/ really pronounced differently? If the former is used, {{IPA}} incorrectly determines that the word has only two syllables. — Sgconlaw (talk) 18:05, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

In that case they're the same for English, I'd think. The difference would be just in the transcription. I guess a little update to the IPA template is in order? MedK1 (talk) 00:32, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

IPA is right: written as/(ˌ)ʌnˈɹævl/ it only has two syllables (/ʌn/ and /ˈɹævl/). If you syllabify it as /ʌn/,/ˈɹæv/&/l/ (or maybe /ʌn/,/ˈɹæ/&/vl/) you get a syllabic consonant and mark it as /l̩/. I don't actually think English speakers ever pronounce something like /rævl/ as one syllable (so I dont think there is an alternative pronunciation). Unless you do, /(ˌ)ʌnˈɹævl/ is just a simplification of "correcter" /(ˌ)ʌnˈɹævl̩/. I just wouldnt copy over the former transcription from OED Jan R Müller (talk) 20:29, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

we

• (personal, often considered patronising) A second- or third-person pronoun for a person in the speaker's care.

How are we feeling this morning?

Second-person, yes, but I can't visualise third-person use. Anyone see what this is referring to? Mihia (talk) 18:34, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

I tried to stretch to contrive a third-person use, but the result was quite weak. And I can't recall ever hearing a third-person use being used by anyone else. That's my "n of 1", as they say, FWIW. Quercus solaris (talk) 22:24, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm just going to delete "or third-person". If anyone disagrees or believes that it should go to full RFV, please restore it. Mihia (talk) 15:44, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

I guess it would be along the lines of "We aren't feeling too well today", spoken by a carer but referring to the "caree" Justin the Just (talk) 12:45, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

"We aren't feeling too well today" addressed to who? Mihia (talk) 15:58, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm thinking that the carer has just seen the caree, and then goes off and is talking to a colleague, and the colleague says "How is Mrs Miggins today?", and the carer says "I'm afraid we aren't feeling too well today". Is this the kind of scenario that you mean? I guess I can just about imagine that this is feasible. Mihia (talk) 16:05, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

That is a usage I have heard on TV, but not mostly with the 'caree' within earshot. DCDuring (talk) 16:09, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Fair enough, I've reinstated it with an example along the lines of the above, but labelled it "uncommon". Mihia (talk) 17:07, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

size stick

A size stick?

does guy b have a size stick? Or one in the room?

How about this fella? He has 100ish tools

maybe here?

But a size stick is probably just a goddam ruler, after all my searching

Looking for pix. Are any of these size sticks? Rowjanes (talk) 21:16, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

I see that Webster 1913 enters it but most modern dictionaries don't. No doubt a stick with notched graduations, predating the Brannock device. (That reminds me a bit of when Lisa Simpson gets affordable braces and they predate stainless steel so you can't get them wet). I'm tempted to call size stick too SoP to meet WT:CFI, but I lack interest in following through on that theme for ideological reasons. (Someone else can bee their bonnet about it if they care to.) This corpus dive looks interesting on the topic, and it led me to a back number (here) of the Boot and Shoe Recorder, no doubt a fine periodical to which any self-respecting shoemonger simply must subscribe, as well as this juicy nugget here, getting warmer. Lol, regards, Quercus solaris (talk) 21:49, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

Google Images has images of measuring devices called variously ritz stick, shoe sizer, size stick, shoe stick, as well as Brannock device. Shoe stick also elicits shoehorns on Amazon. Shoe sizer elicits images of what look like simplified Brannock devices, made of plastic, without show width measurement. Common has pdfs that provide attestation of size stick. There might be picture to be found there. DCDuring (talk) 16:43, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

BTW, the first, multi-sentence definition of shoehorn reads like an ad. DCDuring (talk) 16:48, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

deejay vs DJ

should we mention the variaiton in meaning between the various senses of deejay vs DJ at their spelling entries, or just let wikipedia handle that? in either case i think the text might be best moved away from disc jockey since that term is less common than its abbreviations. for context, w:Toasting (Jamaican music) talks about Jamaican music and uses mostly the spelling deejay, while other music uses mostly the spelling DJ. —Soap— 22:58, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm in favor of WT addressing it concisely via appropriate senseids and concise defs while pointing to WP at disc jockey § Types for usage explanation if desired. For example, at WT at deejay there should be a senseid for the original disc jockey sense and a senseid (with {{lb|en|especially|Jamaica}} label) for the toasting sense. Any usage note at deejay and at DJ can be quite short and say "see disc jockey § Usage notes". The usage note at disc jockey could then say something brief such as "sense variations have developed in the decades since this term and its initialism first appeared. For explanation, see Wikipedia at disc jockey § Types". Quercus solaris (talk) 23:19, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

Part of speech of verb forms with obsolete/unattested root

In Pannonian Rusyn, there exist the words гибай sg (hibaj) and гибайце pl (hibajce), which are imperative forms meaning "come" or "come here". Theoretically, we would reconstruct the infinitive form as *гибац (*hibac), and indeed there exists an Old Slovak hýbať to back this up, but *гибац (*hibac) itself is completely unattested in Pannonian Rusyn, as are any of its non-imperative conjugations. So do we still consider гибай sg (hibaj) and гибайце pl (hibajce) as verb forms, or could they be considered particles or even interjections? Insaneguy1083 (talk) 10:57, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

give up (2)

I am not personally a huge fan of listing synonyms against individual senses, separately from the definitions. I think it clutters and confuses the entries for little extra benefit. Others may take a different view, but in any case I hope we would agree that per-sense "synonyms" ought to be broadly interchangeable with the defined word in many or most situations. Which brings me to "forlend", "forlet" and "blin", which are listed as "synonyms" of everyday senses of "give up". Yes, they can be labelled, but should we include these at all? I feel like deleting them. Any objections? Mihia (talk) Mihia (talk) 21:00, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

I don't object to the deletion. Here's why (if anyone cares): I recommend two themes: (1) At the least, that any obsolete or archaic ones (a) be listed last (after the more important and useful ones) and (b) be marked to show their status clearly (for example, "<qq:obsolete>" or "<qq:archaic>"). That principle serves the reader/user no matter which kind of dictionary Wiktionary is trying to be. Although alphabetical order is a useful default sort order in these templates ({{syn}}, {{ant}}, {{hyper}}, {{hypo}}, {{hol}}, {{mer}}, {{cot}}, {{nearsyn}}), it should certainly not be assumed uncritically to be a straitjacket that is mandatory and thus more important than serving the reader/user's practical purposes. One should use alpha order by default and be bold enough to override it where logical and useful, such as (a) putting the cardinal ones first, (b) grouping similar ones into groups, where the groups are delimited with semicolons; and (c) putting the least useful (or most useless) ones last, if they are included at all. That last point ("if they are included at all") brings me to my number 2 theme, which is (2) it is reasonable to assert that these lists cannot always be exhaustive (although sometimes they may be) and should not be horrendously huge, and therefore it is certainly no "crime" to omit the less important members of the list. Therefore, I support your proposal of each WT editor being authorized (on a WT:BOLD basis) to delete ones that are obsolete or archaic when the editor thinks that including them is not worthwhile. Admittedly this does raise the question of which kind of dictionary WT is trying to be. WT hasn't decided, and that's OK, i.e., livable. If WT is trying to be an unabridged dictionary, then it would not omit anything, frankly, although it would use reasonable sorting and grouping and show/hide collapsing to demote things along a gradient of cardinal and important followed by obsolete arcana or trivia. If WT is trying to act like an advanced learner's dictionary of OALD-inspired or LDOCE-inspired nature, as far as how its defs and syn/ant are presented, which some Wiktionarians clearly lean toward, then it not only might but simply must omit items (from these lists) that are obsolete or arcana or trivia. Since WT is not being built as a unified content set that can be filtered dynamically into any of those output vessels as needed, and probably is many years away from being handled in that way (if ever), in the meantime the happy medium would be to let WT editors delete the least important syns, although also let them keep one when they see a reason why it may be useful. Lastly, regarding what the definition of a synonym is, many people follow the example of many traditional dictionaries and thesauri where "syn" is a loosey-goosey grab-bag miscellany that comprises syn and nearsyn and also often some hyper, hypo, and cot. It is OK that many people dump nearsyn/hyper/hypo/cot into the syn hopper when they contribute to WT, because WT is a wiki that is open to everyone, and people are simply using the loosey-goosey definition of synonym that many reference works exemplify. But those who are capable of re-sorting the miscellany by moving an item from syn to nearsyn, or from syn to hyper or hypo or cot (as semantically logical), can happily move them, as they happen to be in the neighborhood (e.g., happen to be editing any given entry). Wiktionary:Semantic relations shows that WT can rightfully improve upon the loosey-goosey grab-bag approach whenever someone gets around to doing it in each instance. Quercus solaris (talk) 02:35, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

It makes sense to delete them, but being obsolete/archaic, chances are one'll hardly ever come across them unless they get lucky with Special:Random or WOTD. In order to keep the information easily reachable the way it is currently without affecting other forms or confusing beginner learners, perhaps it'd be a good idea to move them to Thesaurus:desist as well. It seems a couple of these are already there actually! Strangely, give up itself isn't actually there. MedK1 (talk) 05:16, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Excellent point regarding a Thesaurus link. It's great when a shortish list of syn or nearsyn (or the other relations) can end in a Thesaurus link, telling the reader/user, "you can see more over there, if you care to click through." That can lead to a more comprehensive set of relations for those who are interested, while keeping the top layer clean for those who don't. Quercus solaris (talk) 06:52, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

@Mihia: I, too, was going to say that if there is a suitable thesaurus entry, move the archaic or obsolete terms there. However, if there isn't, it seems useful to leave them in the main entry (appropriately labelled, of course), otherwise it is hard to see how a reader could easily locate them. — Sgconlaw (talk) 18:02, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

obrigado (Portuguese)

The usage notes are, in my opinion, too wordy and confusing. And also a bit imprecise at the end. Does anyone agree? If so, I suggest replacing it with this more concise version (feel free to modify if needed):

Usage notes

• There is variation regarding the gender-based use of this interjection, with the form obrigado, rather than obrigada, being often used by females as well. This usage is proscribed, nonetheless.
• Additionally, obrigados should be used when speaking as a group (either only males, or males and females), and obrigadas when speaking as a group of females. However, these plural forms are rarely used.

OweOwnAwe (talk) 00:31, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

I don't consider either of the two options confusing, but one thing that is true is that Wiktionary is obligated to be descriptive, not prescriptive. This does not mean that Wiktionary is forbidden to mention any prescriptions that exist (which people sometimes misapprehend), but rather it means that Wiktionary should mention prescriptions that exist without coming across as endorsing them in its own voice. Thus, Wiktionary isn't properly in the business of saying that X is [always] proscribed but rather "sometimes proscribed" or "often proscribed", and it isn't properly in the business of saying that Y "should be used" [full stop] but rather things like "some speakers prescribe that Y should be used instead of X but many speakers ignore this advice," or comparable neutral statements of fact, howsoever anyone wants to phrase them. Quercus solaris (talk) 02:47, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

The first bullet point looks perfectly alright to me.

Following Quercus solaris' thoughts, with which I agree, I believe it'd be best to replace "should be used" with "may be used" or "is often prescribed" according to how it actually works — this is so rare that I'm not even sure if it's actually prescribed, you know? It makes sense theoretically but is it actually considered the right way to say it? MedK1 (talk) 05:06, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

In Portugal I think I've heard women say obrigada more often than obrigado.

I think the old explanation was less confusing, because we now explain that obrigada isnt used before we explain how it is sometimes used.

What about

• Some speakers feel(/believe/argue?) the form ought to be conjugated, using the female form obrigada if the speaker is female. Nevertheless many female speakers just use obrigado.
• Additionally some speakers believe...

...? Jan R Müller (talk) 20:52, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Here in Brazil, "obrigada" is more common and standard as well. It's just that there's still a lot of women who'll use -o here, even if they're not in the majority. ...I actually lowkey associate it with lower classes? Similar to "com eu" and "eu se arrumei".

That's why I'm not so sure about using "some speakers" for the first affirmation here. Using "some speakers" and then "many female speakers" implies that 'number of women using obrigado' > 'number of people who believe women should use obrigada'. MedK1 (talk) 17:22, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

...I now realize my first message might have been unclear. When I said "so rare I'd consider it prescribed", I was talking about the use of "obrigados" in the plural for companies and associations. They normally go with just "obrigado" or even "[nós] agradecemos [...]" MedK1 (talk) 17:26, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

ok, then we write "many speakers" instead. Is "many speakers consider" a good verb here? Jan R Müller (talk) 20:44, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Identitarianism

As entered

I added this entry today and used the gloss parameter (t=) to specify the sense, as the other two senses of the word aren't capitalised outside usual capitalisation conventions. The parameter feels like a bit of a clumsy fit, but there was nothing else near suitable. Is this what's normally done when an alt form only corresponds to one sense of the word? Cameron.coombe (talk) 04:14, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

free speech

I think we're missing a sense here. If you show a space alien our entry's current definitions of free speech, and then the news (e.g. Trump filing lawsuits against media for reporting correct negative things, saying such speech should be illegal), and you ask which side is campaigning on "free speech", the alien would guess wrong, whereas humans understand there's a common second sense, along the lines of "ability to say or do things [especially right-wing things] without other people being free to speak critically of it".
Whereas our first two definitions are about freedom from legal restrictions on speech, this sense is about freedom from social consequences via imposing restrictions (social or legal) on other people's speech. - -sche (discuss) 17:35, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

If someone miscategorizes something using a term like free speech, seeking to legitimize that something, I don't think that changes the meaning of the term used. Simple lying certainly does not. I think it is part of the pragmatics? of argumentation, especially public and legal, for words to be used to miscategorize and mischaracterize things. I think of this as analogous to sarcasm and irony. DCDuring (talk) 18:35, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

I could be mistaken (and that's one reason I'm bringing it up here, to see what other people think!), but I think this is distinct from 'lying-type miscategorization'; I think this is, as with e.g. family values, descriptively a distinct sense. When people (for example) call queer people groomers (as is currently being discussed at RFD), I get the sense that you and I are in agreement that they're not changing the meaning (they mean the usual sense of the word, even if they're dishonest/wrong). But here, there is a large (loose) set of people who use free speech quite consistently to mean a specific thing ("ability to say or do things without criticism (without other people being free to speak critically)") which is very different from sense 1, which I think constitutes, descriptively, a separate sense. - -sche (discuss) 23:18, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that if you gave that definition to any conservative they'd be like "no, you can criticize what I say, you just can't cancel or ban me from your social media for it". And then we'd go right back to sense #1. Perhaps the problem isn't with what they consider free speech, which is the same as what we already have, but what they consider to be censorship, which affects what the definition is actually saying if that makes sense. MedK1 (talk) 00:40, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

I think youre right: If you asks someone, they'd never think theyre using it to mean "without someone criticizing". They would agree with the current definition. They just consider even moderate levels of criticism censorship.

That said, I dont feel good about leaving this ambiguity at the lemma censorship and pretending free speach is an unambiguous word. Changing what is censorship changes the meaning of free speech.

• Mayby it suffices to make a note that there is "considerable controversy on what legal and non-legal actions constitute censorship".
• Mayby someone can come up with a definition that elegantly shows in-and-of-itself the variation in usage.
• Mayby one sense is "without being restrained or censored by state repression" or so and another is "(rare/demagogic) without being restrained or censored by public criticism" or so

(yes, Im aware "demagogic" is unacceptable and prescriptive)

(also I personally havent yet systematically encountered unambiguous usage as "ability to say or do things [especially right-wing things] without other people being free to speak critically of it") Jan R Müller (talk) 21:13, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for this comment. I realized after I posted that I should've emphasized that part of the distinction I see is between ~sense 1 freedom from laws restricting you (free speech viewed as something the government can take away), and this sense, freedom from [laws and] social consequences or private platforms' moderation (free speech viewed as something that Randy from Boise / Ann from Des Moines / Aaron from Bluesky etc. can take away). If not handled as distinct senses, perhaps this could indeed be handled with a usage note that aside from formal government restrictions on speech there is considerable variation in what would be considered a restriction on "free speech" (particularly including whether a private platform restricting things like hate speech, or private people/businesses declining to give someone a job, gig, or platform, violates free speech). - -sche (discuss) 22:37, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Sense one in the US isn't be just with respect to laws. The freedom includes freedom from suppression or almost any restriction by any type of government action at all levels, importantly, executive action, but also informal action by school boards, police personnel, etc. Much of the controversy in the US has to do with whether social media have, in some way, become public utilities, like telephone companies, common carriers etc.. DCDuring (talk) 15:09, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

I'd say this puts it perfectly. MedK1 (talk) 22:35, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

• I think that definition #2, presently "An expression that is or should be allowed in some moral or legal context", would be easier to understand if it was more obviously connected to the first definition. In the examples, it is clear that the writers are essentially using "free speech" to mean "limited free speech". I think it would be clearer if #2 was explicit that it meant a limited version of #1, i.e. "limited right to express an opinion freely in public, excluding morally or legally objectionable content", or however we would word it. That's if this really is a separate sense, as opposed to someone's personal viewpoint or ad hoc redefinition. Mihia (talk) 18:38, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

headbanger

• A mad or eccentric person.

He walks down the street with his trolley. Fuckin' headbanger.

I'm not sure about this definition. I wouldn't think of a harmlessly eccentric person as being a "headbanger". To me, the word (in this sense) conjures up ideas of a fanatical or extreme person. And why is walking down the street with a trolley a mad thing to do anyway? Probably he's just taking his shopping home, poor chap. The person saying this seems more likely to be a "fuckin' headbanger" to me. Not many dictionaries seem to cover this sense. Any views? Mihia (talk) 18:41, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Why not just RfV it? That the English RfV page is too long means we should figure out how to shorten it, not that we shouldn't use it. DCDuring (talk) 21:55, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Green's Dictionary of Slang and both Oxford and Cambridge learners' dictionaries have similar definitions. Greens' has cites. See “Headbanger”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. DCDuring (talk) 22:00, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

The Green's definition is closer to how I understand it (in the relevant "mad" sense): "a psychotic, a randomly, obsessively violent person, someone who cannot control their temper". The Cambridge Learners' definition "a stupid or silly person" is different again, since "stupid" and "silly" does not mean "mad". We seem not to have this per se, yet their second example we give as a separate sense, "A political hardliner". Mihia (talk) 22:13, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Green's cites for the non-music sense (yours) are all Commonwealth, except for the Observer which they flag as unspecified, tho HQ is in London. DCDuring (talk) 23:11, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Rawnsley in the "Oberserver" is British. The Cambridge sense "stupid or silly person" is also labelled "UK", but, as with "eccentric", I'm not familiar with such a mild meaning as "silly". However, Green's also has "weak or affectionate use of sense 1 [i.e. the 'strong' sense]" where all the cites are Scottish. If general UK usage was "strong", but Scottish (or indeed other regional) use could be "weak", then that could make sense ... but I am somewhat speculating. Mihia (talk) 00:14, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Yes RFVE page is long, but the main problem, for me, is that it is so hair-tearingly slow to load and navigate. It can take me a minute or more just to open the page. Then once the page is open it seems to cause my browser to periodically creak and freeze until I close it. Features such as "Reply" and "Add Topic" are effectively unusable for me. The text content of the RFVE page is about 600k, which is not extreme, but I think it is all the other bells and whistles that add to the load. I raised this at GP but it didn't go anywhere, except that we need to reduce the size. I suggested archiving older threads. Mihia (talk) 20:14, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

A few cites that seem to back up eccentric without being dangerous:

• 1997, Andrew Greig, Summit Fever: An Armchair Climber's Init[i]ation to Glencoe, Mortal Terror and ʻThe Himalayan Matterhornʼ, The Mountaineers Books, →ISBN, page 47:

  I knew he'd been out to the Himalayas once, on an unsuccessful but highly educational trip to Annapurna 3 , and that he was beginning to make a name for himself with some bold Alpine ascents. 'A bit of a headbanger,' someone opined. 'I don't know,' Mal said, frowning, 'I thought he was pretty impressive when we did that new route on the Ben.

• 2001, Pat Reid, Faces, →ISBN:

  What was it Duggan had called the man? A harmless headbanger. That seemed an accurate description.

• 2014 December 4, Sarah Harrison, Foreign Parts, Pan Macmillan, →ISBN:

  The girls exploded. 'What a basketcase! What a headbanger!'
  George - back at the wheel for safety's sake - said: 'I thought he was a charming chap.'
  I said, 'But a little eccentric, you must admit.'

Smurrayinchester (talk) 11:27, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

By the way, the Scottish milder, sometimes affectionate "stupid person" sense is easy to verify for the spelling variant heidbanger:

• 2008 September 4, Iain Banks, The Crow Road, Hachette UK, →ISBN:

  'David Byrne; the guy in Talking Heads, ya heidbanger.'

• 2013 May 7, Joey W. Hill, Taken by a Vampire, Penguin, →ISBN, page 267:

  'No one drew pictures of trees, rocks, hills. What was the purpose o' that? He was a crazy heidbanger, was all, and somehow had enough money to support the nonsense.

• 2014 April 3, Rachel Seiffert, The Walk Home, Hachette UK, →ISBN:

  'Ach Maw. Shug's no stupit.'
  Graham looked at her. And then he blinked:
  'Aye, Okay. So mebbe he is. A heidbanger. Just playin, but.'

Searching "You headbanger" also finds a few cites that mainly seem to be Irish:

• 2008 September 4, Kate Thompson, Creature of the Night, Random House, →ISBN, page 35:

  'I seen a little woman,' he said. 'Just there.' He pointed to the dog flap. 'Peeping in, she was.'
  'You're a head-banger too,' I said to him.

• 2012 November 15, Paul Johnston, The Death List, Harlequin, →ISBN:

  "We're going in?" Rog said with a slack grin.
  "Hold your horses, you headbanger. Only if we reckon we can surprise them."

• 2022 November 24, Graham Masterton, Katie Maguire: The Complete Collection, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN:

  'Dara! What are you going to do, you headbanger?' the girlfriend screamed out. 'Jump out the fecking windie? Well, why don't you, that's the first and only time you'll ever fly!'

Smurrayinchester (talk) 11:39, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for finding these. I have copied them to the Citations page for now, so we don't lose them, pending finalisation of the sense distinctions. My feeling at the moment is that it would make sense to split the definitions of the "strong" and "weak" uses. Mihia (talk) 17:21, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

強迫性障害

I’m pretty sure the IPA/pronunciation provided on this word is actually the pronunciation of a different word that’s listed as a synonym on the page. I don’t feel qualified to change it, is there anyone who can? 96.42.104.114 02:49, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Looks right to me, apart from I think a typo in the etymology. Justin the Just (talk) 12:40, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

it was fixed in this diff. —Soap— 20:34, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

pull

3. "To attract or net; to pull in."
4. "(UK, Ireland) To persuade (someone) to have sex with one."
I've heard Americans use pull to mean something along the lines of ~'interest someone in dating or pursuing you', without a requirement that this led to sex. For example, these characters (Americans by an American cartoonist) didn't have sex, the girl just got the (gay) guy to date her.
Of course, I've also heard Americans use pull in the sense we label "UK", to mean you interested someone and had sex, so the "UK" label on sense 4 seems wrong... but is the definition being restricted to sex also wrong (too narrow); can you (in Britain) use the word also in the "American" way I describe, to mean you interested someone in dating/pursuing you, whether or not you've had sex? If not, what definition covers that usage? Is it intended to be covered by "To attract or net; to pull in"? IMO that definition is worded too broadly and vaguely; it took me a while to work out that it might(??) be intended to be what covered this... - -sche (discuss) 08:39, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

I think what's special about sense 4 compared to sense 3 is it is (or can be) intransitive: "Grab your coat love, you've pulled" is a famous cliche. The example quote given ("I pulled at the club last night") would, at least in the UK, only be understood as "I had sex with someone I met at the club last night", not "I got a woman interested in me but did not go any further". The Dumbing of Age quote is interesting and surprising to me - given the college setting, I wonder if it's Gen Z slang (although the cartoonist is actually older than I am). Searching "pull + Gen Z" gets a lot of Gen Z slang dictionaries, so it might be UK slang that has recently reached US shores. Smurrayinchester (talk) 11:16, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

今日, 昨日 and other Japanese orthographic borrowings from Chinese

Not sure if the Grease Pit would be a better location for this discussion, but 今日, 昨日 and most other Japanese orthographic borrowings from Chinese using the {{obor}} template autogenerate a modern pinyin transcription of the borrowed Chinese term. This appears to imply that these are modern orthographic borrowings, even though many of these terms are documented using these borrowed spellings since the Middle Chinese period.

Should these entries be updated in some way to reflect that these are Middle Chinese borrowings, in the same way that kango pronunciations are, or are they fine as is? Horse Battery (talk) 00:39, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

By any chance, what does poscatboiler mean? (i'm korean)

This module has the word poscatboiler in the module title. I think it is pos-cat-boiler, but I'm not sure how to translate it into Korean. My guess is something like "position category boiler", but I'm not sure, and I'm not sure what a boiler is. Whatback11 (talk) 12:44, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

I asked chatgpt and they said that it means "part of speech category boilerplate", so if I translate it into Korean, it's like "품사분류상용구(poomsa bunryu sang-yongu)". Whatback11 (talk) 12:59, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

chatgpt has it right. DCDuring (talk) 15:38, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

• Module:category tree/poscatboiler is the aforementioned module. I'm surprised ChatGPT got that! — excarnateSojourner (ta·co) 08:01, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

can to form polite(ish) requests

I don't think we have the modal use of "can" to form moderately polite requests. "Can you come over here?" doesn't really fit any of the senses we have at the moment. While the fiction is that the asker is merely asking sense 1 or sense 3, in a lot of circumstances I think it's understood as being closer in meaning to "Will you come over here?". I see we mention that in a usage note, but should it be its own sense? Smurrayinchester (talk) 12:58, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

Sense 2 has "Can I use your pen?" which is surely asking permission and not whether it's a theoretically possible act. On the other hand, could has a separate sense for the polite request. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:3947:C247:AEBD:7431 17:37, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

I think that's a separate sense. "Do I have permission to use your pen?" makes sense, "Do you have permission to come over here?" does not in almost all circumstances. Smurrayinchester (talk) 08:38, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

I agree that "used to form requests" should be covered in the definitions, not merely a usage note. As well as "polite(ish)", it can be downright rude, in fact (albeit many things can be rude if you shout loudly enough at someone). Mihia (talk) 18:42, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

As in, “Can you shut up and sit down?”[2]  --Lambiam 02:33, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

"you got me"

I was watching this (US-made) film and there was a woman calling another on her mobile saying: "Hi! I was expecting your call!" And the other answered: "You got meee!" -- What sense of "get" would this likely be? From the context and tone I was thinking sense 23 (as in "you caught me and I'm sorry"), but I really don't know. Any thoughts? Thank you (and note that I'm not a native English speaker.) 92.73.31.113 17:30, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

Much easier to answer if you can provide a link to the video or audio, to show context and intonation. Sometimes "you got me" can mean "you (have) got me (stumped / baffled)" i.e. I have no answer); but it sounds unlikely here. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:3947:C247:AEBD:7431 17:35, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

When you write "meee", do you mean to indicate that this word was stressed (emphasised)? From the context, I would firstly guess that "You got me" means "You've rightly called me out for not doing something that I said I would", somewhat like sense 23, as you say, but milder, at least milder than the examples presently there, so perhaps we're missing a sense or nuance there. Another possibility is "Well, you've got hold of me now", i.e. got in contact anyway, even though I didn't call. However, neither of these fits very well with a stressed "me". Mihia (talk) 18:27, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

As Mihia said, hard to know for sure without listening in context, but here's something that may be relevant: There is a bit of a cultural echo of people saying on the phone, "you called *me*", of which the longer form is "you called *me*, I didn't call *you*." (One of those ghits captures an instance when Donald Trump said it, but that's not because Trump was the inventor of it. It predates the 2010s, which I know for a fact via a coincidence.) It is a way of conveying the idea that if you are the one who wants something from me, not the other way around, then don't pretend that I'm the one who initiated the call. In other words, the reason this call is even happening (at all) is because you were the agent who initiated it and I am the recipient, so don't act like I owe you anything right now. It can be rude sometimes, but sometimes it is in fact calling out some (real or alleged) subtle rudeness of the other person, when they are trying to act like an obligation exists on your part when it really doesn't. Quercus solaris (talk) 21:52, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

English words where r was originally not pronounced, just a non-rhotic-dialect spelling convention

Do we have a list (or category) of these? Would it be of interest to? For example, juggernaut has an r in the (American) pronunciation because it has an r in the spelling, but it doesn't have an r in the source-language pronunciation: the r was added by British spellers for whom it didn't add any rhotic sound (and I have seen this used to help establish a timeline of British non-/rhotacism). The rs in Myanmar and Burma, absent from the Burmese pronunciations we give, appear to have gotten there the same way (in Myanmar's case, perhaps intended to help ensure the final vowel is /ɑ/ rather than schwa); so too the r in quarl. I seem to recall some native-English terms also have originally-unpronounced rs. - -sche (discuss) 18:16, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

An example of a native-English term would be erm, which North American speakers don't always recognize as um. We have a rhotic pronunciation in the entry, which is of course more of a reading pronunciation than anything. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 19:18, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

Another example would be char in the sense of tea (such a reading pronunciation wouldn’t occur with the alternative form cha though, of course). Overlordnat1 (talk) 03:40, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

It is Category:English spelling pronunciations, even if only one regional accent or individually common pronunciation is affected, why isn’t the entry in it yet? You mention the observation in the etymology and Fanny is your aunt. Fay Freak (talk) 05:19, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

if we're making a list, i can add sagamore. It comes from a time when even American speech was largely nonrhotic and the modern pronunciation is re-formed. Possibly also lark in the sense of play. —Soap— 20:27, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Mister Man

I've never heard this. Does it need regional and/or temporal qualifiers? This, that and the other (talk) 23:20, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

For me personally, there is a lot of interference from Mr. Men, and as a consequence (I think) I tend to read "Mister Man" with the stress on "Mister". If I dispel this idea and stress "Man", yes, I think it is somewhat familiar as a general appellation. The two quotes at https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/p42zvdi are both US. Two of our three are US and the other is British. Ngrams shows broadly similar AmE and BrE usage [3]. I thought it might be slightly old-fashioned, but Ngrams does not seem to bear this out. I'm assuming there aren't too many false positives there. Mihia (talk) 21:56, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Audio at French sait

Is it me, or is the audio at French sait seriously off?

Audio:

(file)

I hear a warrior from the dark side of the Force being called.  --Lambiam 18:46, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

It is perfectly fine Saumache (talk) 19:06, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

Isn't this supposed to be homophone with saie, which to me sounds as it should:

Audio:

(file)

For sait I hear a palindromic [θɪθ], all non-French phonemes, and ending on a consonant.  --Lambiam 02:17, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

I have no idea what you're talking about... There's a bit of background noise, but it sounds perfectly fine to me and I don't hear anything palindromic, or [θ], much less [θɪθ]. If anything, the audio for sait sounds better than the one for saie, since the latter ends in a glottal stop. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:27, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

To me, "sait" sounds at first like "sith" on my tinny laptop speakers, but the "th" sound is hiss on the recording. Mihia (talk) 09:49, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

I hear [se], same as in "saie". I think the [θ] you're hearing at the end is actually background noise or some sort of trait from the recording's poor quality; he must've used his phone or something lol. Either way, regardless of how 'correct' the pronunciation is, the recording at "saie" is clearly the one with the better audio quality; it might be a good call to go and replace the recordings, especially since they're homophones. MedK1 (talk) 22:31, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

does wolf have a vowel

See recent (and older!) edit history. /ˈwl̩f/ was added by Gilgamesh in 2013, removed by Mahagaja in 2014, and restored by Gilgamesh asserting (as elsewhere) that merging the bowl and bull vowels to /l̩/ was something all millennial Americans did. (In discussions, the only evidence anyone could find was a minor academic reference to some people in the PNW doing something similar.) It was discussed again in 2016 and removed, readded in 2019, and subject to edits just now (@Hftf, Nicodene, Soap).
The solution seems simple: if some people pronounce wolf as /ˈwl̩f/ or [wɫ̩f], find documentation of that in linguistics literature. It seems possible to me(!), but it also seems clear that relying on our own lay assessments of what we think we hear is error-prone ("everyone drops the vowels from, and merges, bowl and bull!"). - -sche (discuss) 08:43, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for the ping and bringing to Tea room. As for the linguistics literature, see for starters:

Is there a stressed syllabic /l/? Answer: yes, in some dialects. This may come about from historical sequences of various short vowels plus /l/. Kantner & West (1938: 328) give the pronunciation [mɫ̩k] for "milk" (from /mɪlk/). Bailey (1985: 237) has "pull" (/pʊl/) as [pɫ̩ː], and has a spectrogram supporting the claim that there is really a pure syllabic consonant here, not a vowel followed by /l/. Wells (1982: 551) describes Southern American English dialects which have a stressed syllabic velar (not velarized alveolar) lateral [ʟː] out of /ʊl/ in words like "full", "bull", and "wolf", or even out of /ʌl/ in the words "bulge" and "bulk" (though it is not clear whether these latter two words had /ʌl/ directly before they had [ʟː] , or whether /ʊl/ was an intermediate stage). Hammond (1999: 143) mentions possible pronunciations of /ʊl/ and /ʌl/ in words such as "bull" or "mull" as [l̩].
—Guenter, Joshua. 2000. "The Vowels of California English Before /r/, /l/, and /ŋ/", pp. 104-105 http://escholarship.org/uc/item/602810m9

Found from a forum thread [4] where various American English speakers have given similar anecdotal or self-reports [5] [6]; Googling for strings like pɫ̩ and wɫ̩ return a few others [7] [8]. Chapter 7 of Guenter describes an illuminating psycholinguistic experiment in which speakers struggled significantly on a timed task classifying the central elements of pull and look as same or different, saying "for many speakers, /ʊl/ contains no [ʊ] but is the syllabic lateral [ɫ̩] … some of the subjects lack a true /ʊ/ before /l/ … that could explain why they could not categorize the vowel in pull with that in look or hood."

I already spent a dozen hours on this in Praat (efforts recording, analyzing, stitching my speech are available in the Wiktionary Discord's #english channel) and reading papers in the last few days, so I may have to return to the topic another day if there's more to say. On the theoretical status of syllabic consonants, some scholarship and introductory textbooks (see many in Discord) do give a broad generalization that they are not found in English stressed syllables, but studies of acoustic phonetics and specific psycholinguistic experiments like the above periodically describe a few real exceptions in various American Englishes, so I would give more weight to them and less weight to the broad generalizations on this question. Hftf (talk) 09:57, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

I was unaware of the earlier wlf lore on Wiktionary, but I find it fitting that Gilgamesh was attempting to transcribe an ‘L-coloured vowel’. Cf. Hftf's ‘[wɫ̣f]’ for a recording with a clear vowel, made clearer still when Erutuon experimentally cut out the L and found the result to sound like woof.

The quotation that Hftf has provided above points to the following report by John Wells (Accents of English, pp 550–1) concerning dialects in the southern United States:

• ‘The phoneme /l/ itself exhibits greater allophonic differences in the south than in other parts of North America … Where dark /l/ is not dropped it is potentially subject to a realization involving an unusual form of articulation … This is a kind of velar lateral … This [ʟ] coalesces with a preceding /ə/ to form a syllabic velar lateral in words such as middle [ˈmɪdʟ̣]. It also coalesces with a preceding /ʊ/ in words such as full /fʊl/ [fʟ̣ː], bull, wolf.’

I note that [wʟ̣f] is less awkward to articulate than *[wɫ̣f] thanks to the adjacent approximants sharing a place of articulation.

Of the links provided by Hftf, a total of two (A, B) lead to some mention of [wɫ̣], never in an academic source. The Google search (A) brings up ten hits, of which four are Wiktionary or off-site copies thereof, the remainder being posts on social media, including (B). I digress.

A key point to mention here is that, leaving aside the apparent rarity (per various sources outright absence) of stressed syllabic consonants in English, it has a constraint that blocks the formation of syllabic consonants in C¹VC² unless C¹ has lower sonority than C²:

• ‘A curious feature of English post-tonic syncope is that it is sensitive to the quality of the flanking consonants: the consonant following the alternating vowel must be a sonorant which is more sonorous than the consonant preceding the schwa (i.e. no syncope is possible in words like dél*(i)cate or cól*(o)ny). These are the same conditions as those applying to syllabic consonant formation.’ - Polgárdi, Krisztina. 2015. “Syncope, syllabic consonant formation, and the distribution of stressed vowels in English”. Journal of Linguistics. 51: 383–423.

See there for further discussion. The key phrase ‘syllabic consonant formation’ can be used to find other relevant sources.

The only cited datum contrary to this is the above report about [wʟ̣ːf] (not *[wɫ̣f]) among speakers of Southern American English (not ‘General American’), incidentally in competition with a wuf pronunciation (p 550: ‘dark /l/ is sometimes deleted in the environment of a following labial or velar, as in help, bulb, golf, shelve’).

Also worth mentioning:

• ‘Syllabic /l/ doesn't occur after approximants /r l j w/’ - Carley, Paul. Mees, Inger M. 2021. American English phonetic transcription. Routlege: London/New York
• ‘SCF [syllabic consonant formation] involving the alveolar lateral only requires that the sequence be preceded by at least one consonant, other than /w j r/ (approximants)’ - Lecumberri, Maria & Maidment, John A. 2013. English transcription course. Routledge: Abingdon/New York.

Nicodene (talk) 11:42, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

I appreciate -sche bringing this to the Tea Room. My first question to you, Nicodene, is why you didnt do this yourself yesterday after you'd reverted the edit for the third time and I told you to bring it to the Tea Room so the wider world could see. But, no, you reverted a fourth time and it seems to me you're only here because your hand was forced.

Now here are your edit summaries from those four edits, and inline I'll post my responses:

Presumably the intended transcription was [wəɫf] or something of the sort. Pronouncing a genuinely vowel-less [wɫ̩f] is probably beyond the abilities of 99+% of the human species

I'd expect with the amount of time you've spent on this project that you would know by now that syllabic L exists, not just in Czech (e.g. vlk) but also in English, where we list it in words like bottle, in the latter of which it is a dark L. Why would this same syllabic dark L be impossible to pronounce in stressed position? You never explained.

I'm sorry but there isn't a man, woman, child, or dog alive who has ever pronounced "wolf" without a vowel

Addressed above.

That there IS a vowel in wool/wolf is what "makes perfect sense". Every single rendition I can find on YouGlish, or have ever heard in real life, or have heard from Hftf, has a vowel in front of [ɫ]. For comparison I have demonstrated what [ɫ] sounds like without a vowel in front, and also what wolf would sound like without a vowel before its [ɫ]. Cannot find a single example of such wool/wolf pronounced that way in real life, on dictionaries w/ audio, or on Youglish. Burden of proof.

So, you're saying Hftf is wrong about their own speech? That's at best a circular argument and I feel bad they wasted their time on Discord and glad that we're finally here in public.

It appears that the genuine alternation of unstressed [Cəɫ] and [Cɫ̩] in English, for instance at the end of ‘icicle’, has led *three (3) people to believe that any instance of [Cəɫ] actually IS [Cɫ̩], even in stressed syllables. Cf. the several audio examples provided of how [Cəɫ]≠[Cɫ̩] and also of how an actual [wɫ̩] sounds. If you think somebody says ‘wool’ like that (and not as [wəɫ]/[wʊ̽ɫ]/etc.) please present an example.

Where are you getting this straw-man argument from? Who are the three people? is one of them me? Where did I say that?

And now you've spent much of the last 36 hours going into discussions about formants and spectrograms on Discord, a subject far beyond my ken, but given your inability or unwillingness to even answer the most basic questions above, I have no confidence that I'm missing anything important.

Again to restate this very simple question:

Why would this same syllabic dark L be impossible to pronounce in stressed position?

That's all I have to say for now. —Soap— 15:42, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

why you didnt do this yourself yesterday after you'd reverted the edit for the third time and I told you to bring it to the Tea Room so the wider world could see. But, no, you reverted a fourth time and it seems to me you're only here because your hand was forced.

That’s one way of framing it, I suppose. Now from the other side:

1) I found a bit of content on a page that seemed incorrect. I removed it and explained why.

2) You and Hftf came along, having never edited that page before, to revert my edit three times in a row.

I can just as well ask why you didn’t start a Tea Room thread instead of doing that.

I’ll answer from my end. There was already an extremely long discussion on Discord. Why rehash all the same points here? Now the three of us have been pinged here, and here we are rehashing away.

I'd expect with the amount of time you've spent on this project that you would know by now that syllabic L exists

Correct.

Why would this same syllabic dark L be impossible to pronounce in stressed position?

It’d be a bit strange of me to say it’s impossible to pronounce stressed L and then go on to do it twenty or so times in the recordings I’ve made demonstrating [(w)ɫ̣(f)] versus [(w)əɫ(f)].

My point was that the combination [wɫ̣f] is tricky to pronounce, mainly because of the sequence [wɫ̣], and the result sounds unlike any pronunciation of the English word wolf that I have ever heard.

So, you're saying Hftf is wrong about their own speech?

About their transcription.

Where are you getting this straw-man argument from? Who are the three people? is one of them me? Where did I say that?That is the only explanation that comes to mind for your saying that there is no vowel in [əɫ].

The count of three was based on you, Hftf, and Britannic124 - the person who added the pronunciations to both pages (1, 2). It didn’t occur to me to dig back further in the edit history to discover the even earlier add-delete cycles. Nicodene (talk) 18:37, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Not everyone here uses Discord. I dont understand your insistence on trying to handle this offsite, but from what I can tell, nobody agreed with you there either, and, because you just kept on talking, one of the other participants found some scholars who confirm what we were saying all along — that syllabic L exists, even in stressed syllables, and that for some speakers it appears in the words wolf and wool while for others it only appears in the word set pull ~ bull ~ full.

You've seen the evidence and keep on denying it. And from what I can see, you haven't provided any evidence of your own, either, just denials of what others have shown you. I'd like you to bow out of the discussion and let other people handle it. If someone else is willing to tell us that wolf cannot have a syllabic L, i'd be happy to engage them on the topic here on the discussion board intended for that purpose. if nobody else is interested, i'd like to go ahead and revert the wolf page to the way it was before you came upon it. —Soap— 12:34, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

@Soap: As far as I can see, the issue here has nothing to do with whether syllabic "l" can exist in stressed syllables, and it's silly to lecture @Nicodene about a point he apparently never made. It also doesn't help that you're mostly discussing his actions, not the points he did make here. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:41, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

1) First and foremost, here is Hftf's own recording wherein he claims to pronounce wolf without a vowel. It runs once normally, then once with vowel duration increased in Praat. The vowel in question is clearly audible, and it's [ɵ].

2) Again, I do not deny the existence of syllabic [ɫ]. I have pronounced examples of it several dozens of times in the recordings that I have uploaded for illustration.

3) [wʟ(f)] is far easier to pronounce and completely plausible. Starting with [w], the back of the tongue just has to lift a tiny bit up more. Whereas for [wɫ] (with no vowel) the back of the tongue has to consistently maintain its height for a velar constriction while at the same time the tip of the tongue is being lifted all the way to the alveolar ridge. That involves considerable effort on both ends of the tongue at the same time, and that's why [wɫ] is difficult to pronounce. A far more natural sequence of events, starting with [w], is to release the velar constriction and then lift the tip of the tongue. In the intervening time, one is producing a vowel (airflow without there being a constriction produces a vowel, by definition). I explain this in the recordings as well, and I pronounce both sequences [wʟf] and [wɫf] for illustration.

4) In light of the above, it is little surprise that zero evidence has been found so far about any word in English beginning with [wɫ], or for that matter in any other language. I would be very interested to see any.

Nicodene (talk) 19:16, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

so can we make this debate about whether it's [wʟf] or [wɫ̩f]? again, as above, my only reason for participating in this discussion was the edit summaries of your four reverts, where you insisted there MUST be a vowel, and that it was IMPOSSIBLE to pronounce it without. i think Htft even posted a book citing this very word with a syllabic [ʟ]. i just want to make sure youre really saying this and are not going to go back and say there's no [wʟf] either. i've not participated in the Discord chat for several days now.

i'd also add we shouldnt expect scholars to catalog the precise phonetic pronunciation of every single word in the English language, so i personally still think [wɫ̩f] is also possible, but if we can agree to at least list [wʟf] i think the readers of wiktionary will understand that it's just a syllabic L in general and that's all that matters for most purposes. —Soap— 10:10, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

If you were to read my comments in this thread, you would find that every aspect of this has been addressed. Nicodene (talk) 16:40, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

I agree with Chuck Entz that the issue is not just whether syllabic L can be stressed (which seems clearly possible, depending on language/accent). Rather, the question is whether [wɫ̩f] occurs as a non-negligible pronunciation of the word "wolf" (and if so, whether we should note it rather than leaving out this detail, as we unavoidably leave out many other details relating to non-phonemic variation in pronunciation). While no source has yet been cited for the specific transcription [wɫ̩f], I don't see why we can't simply include a transcription with [ʟ] using Wells 1982:551 as a reference.--Urszag (talk) 20:05, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

it's annoying that we need that (Southern US) tag on it, .... a pronunciation that exists in the Southern US but has nothing to do with Southern accents generally .... but if we're going to fight over this we need a way to resolve that fight so this looks like the best way forward to me. —Soap— 11:18, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

If you personally believe that the pronunciation [wʟf] is found in General American, you are certainly free to attempt to find evidence for that claim. The same goes for *[wɫf], or any word beginning with [wɫ] in English or even any other language in the world. Nicodene (talk) 12:02, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

anyone can see up above that four days ago you were telling us no one had EVER pronounced wolf without a vowel. your intent on riding here as if you've been the voice of reason all along isnt fooling anyone. and giving a useless reply to every comment i write, sending me an aggressive DM on Discord five days after my last message there, which you then deleted, and the fact that the opinion now is the opinion you said was impossible a week ago leads me to believe youre in this for the fight. why not drop it and let the community handle it? and since i suspect youre looking to make me the bad guy in all this, all i've done here is revert 2 of your 4 removals of the original longstanding pronunciation. i saw no reason to do any more because i was confident the community would handle it.

it'd be nice if you could admit you were wrong, but hey, if you dont want to do that, fine. just leave me alone and stop trying to drag me back into a fight i have no reason to be in. —Soap— 23:32, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

anyone can see up above that four days ago you were telling us no one had EVER pronounced wolf without a vowel

No. I said “Pronouncing a genuinely vowel-less [wɫ̩f] is probably beyond the abilities of 99+% of the human species”. If you have any evidence that anyone ever has pronounced the word as [wɫ̩f], you are certainly free to share it.

and giving a useless reply to every comment i write

What would you consider more useful than a detailed phonetic description and analysis? And what have you contributed that would count as useful?

sending me an aggressive DM

Aggressive?

the opinion now is the opinion you said was impossible a week ago

No, I did not.

all i've done here is revert 2 of your 4 removals of the original longstanding pronunciation

Dating all the way back to the ancient times of 2019, prior to which there had been two deletions by Mahagaja and -sche.

it'd be nice if you could admit you were wrong

It'd be even nicer if you could stop lying. The quote is: “Pronouncing a genuinely vowel-less [wɫ̩f] is probably beyond the abilities of 99+% of the human species”. This is about the pronunciation [wɫ̩f], and I did not say it was impossible whatsoever. I pronounced it just fine in the very first recording that I submitted on Discord, and several times thereafter.

stop trying to drag me back into a fight i have no reason to be in

You inserted yourself into the revert-war that Hftf started against me, you inserted yourself into the discussion on Discord, and you inserted yourself into this thread. My comments here are in response to your messages throwing out constant accusations of this or that. I would love it if you would leave me alone.

Nicodene (talk) 00:00, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

OK i think anyone reading this thread has made up their minds by now on our personality conflict and dont want to see any more of it. this thread is intended to be about minority pronunciations of wolf, and i would like to get back to that question. i think people here may have had enough of that question too for the time being, but there's no rush here, and when i get some free time i will go looking for other academic resources. —Soap— 13:12, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

fail forward

Does this deserve an entry? PUC – 14:38, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

“fail forward”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. yields nothing (yet?). Google Books shows 10 book titles, mostly 2000 and later, but one from 1984, that include the term. There are numerous distractions from much earlier in marine/naval literature. Semantically it doesn't seem completely transparent to me. It reminds me of forward in pay it forward, though forward has a different meaning in that expression. In fail forward it seems to be just putting a positive spin on failing. DCDuring (talk) 16:26, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Agnosophobia

What would you think of this word being another phobia? I'm struggling with this, so that is why I created it.

It means: The fear or intense anxiety of not understanding something, especially when you deeply desire to comprehend it but feel mentally incapable. 178.118.67.54 18:05, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Agnosophobia

I'm suffering with this term. I created this term because I think it deserves to be in the dictionaries.

Definition: The fear or intense anxiety of not understanding something, especially when you deeply desire to comprehend it but feel mentally incapable. Sebapro1 (talk) 18:07, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Please see WT:CFI to determine if a term should be in Wiktionary or not. Vininn126 (talk) 18:17, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

If the term exists, I expect it to mean, “fear of not knowing”. In Ancient Greek, “to grasp” (mentally) and “to perceive” used the same verb, αἰσθάνομαι (aisthánomai) (like we can say in English, “Ah! Now I see.”). “Fear of not understanding” might then become something like *anesthematophobia.  --Lambiam 02:04, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Is braking a noun or a verb in automated emergency braking (AEB) (system)?

Is braking a noun or a verb in automated emergency braking (AEB) system?

1. According to recently published testing by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, pedestrians wearing reflective clothing at night might actually be less visible to some vehicles’ automatic emergency braking systems than if they were wearing non-reflective light-colored clothing, or even all-black outfits in some case
   • source = Reflective Safety Clothing Might Make You Invisible To Some Automatic Emergency Braking Systems: IIHS, Thomas Hundal, The Autopian, 9 January 2025
2. In April, the agency finalized a safety rule that will require all new cars and light trucks to include automatic emergency braking by 2029, estimating it would help save at least 360 lives and 24,000 injuries annually.
   • source = Automatic emergency braking is making progress at slow speeds: AAA, Kalena Thomhave, automotivedive, 18 Nov 2024
3. In April 2024, after eight years of industry discussions on how to make automated emergency braking (AEB) a standard feature on new vehicles, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) officially issued a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard that will require AEB and pedestrian automatic emergency braking systems to be installed in all new passenger cars and light trucks starting in September 2029. The agency said this new requirement will save at least 360 lives and prevent at least 24,000 injuries each year. And, for years, automakers have said they were on board, and promised to bring AEB to more new models.
   • source = Feds Refuse to Hit the Brakes on Automated Emergency Braking, Sebastian Blanco, 27 Nov 27 2024

Seems like a noun to me, occasionally used attributively. — Sgconlaw (talk) 12:49, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

1 and 3 clearly show use as a noun. "-ing forms" can also be"

1. verb components for progressive aspect use ("The train had been braking for nearly 15 seconds before the crash.") and other structures
2. adjectives, though it is more economical for us to treat them as nouns used attributively.

See -ing on Wikipedia.Wikipedia . HTH. DCDuring (talk) 17:36, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

Maybe an easy way to remember: it's a system for braking (noun); it's not a system that brakes. Leasnam (talk) 20:23, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

Oh, goodie, another gerund argument. Braking (noun) is the act of braking (verb). Works this way with a lot of -ing words! Purplebackpack89 21:13, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

The use of the adjective "automated" or "automatic" as a modifier in the phrase "automatic emergency braking"/"automated emergency braking" makes it fairly clear that this is a noun. When used as a verb, "braking" would instead be modified by an adverb, as in "automatically breaking".--Urszag (talk) 21:29, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

I deduce from the answer that the three examples could be add at the noun entry of braking, or in the automatic emergency braking entry if it exists. Thanks for the answer.

wisdom

Is sense 1 ("An element of personal character that enables one to distinguish the wise from the unwise.") useful at all? It sounds both pretentious and uninformative. And what is the difference between senses 4 ("The ability to apply relevant knowledge in an insightful way, especially to different situations from that in which the knowledge was gained.") and 5 ("The ability to make a decision based on the combination of knowledge, experience, and intuitive understanding.")? PUC – 21:58, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

I think the wise course is to consider “wisdom”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. DCDuring (talk) 23:08, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Interpreting dictionary definitions requires wisdom.  --Lambiam 01:21, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

I would support deleting "cute" sense 1 and merging 4 and 5 (or rewriting a new def to cover both). I do think, though, that we should try to somehow retain a mention of the word "wise" in all this. I would also like to see it exemplified how sense 3 is definitely distinct in any useful way. To some extent, this looks like another one of those articles where we make a simple thing complicated by unnecessarily defining it in multiple ways that can hardly be distinguished, or at any rate aren't clearly distinguished by example. Having said that, I think there are other possible distinct senses listed in other dictionaries that we are lacking. Mihia (talk) 15:43, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

ourselves

• (colloquial, may seem patronising) Referring to an individual person being addressed, especially a person in the speaker's care.

Hello Mrs Miggins. Did we manage to wash ourselves this morning? (reflexive)

Well done Timmy! Did we make that model ourselves? (emphatic)

I added this, and, while I'm sure that we say such things colloquially, the more I look at it the more unsure I am whether we typically say "ourselves" or "ourself" in these cases. Or both. I think I have looked at it too much now. Does anyone else have fresh eyes to look at this? Mihia (talk) 22:06, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

It sounds sorta OK either way, but I think grammatical number agreement beats the alternative, at least for the reflexive case. The emphatic usage example seems to me also accusatory, so I find it implausible that the accuser would want to be included in the accusation. DCDuring (talk) 23:04, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Isn't that independent from the apparent number of the reflexive pronoun?  --Lambiam 01:11, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

I don't fully understand that. Are you saying that you think "ourselves" sounds "more right" in both examples? Or not? Mihia (talk) 19:56, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

According to this source: “We is sometimes used with singular reference, ... as when a doctor asks a patient How are we today? It then has reflexive form ourself.”  --Lambiam 01:19, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

True regarding these pronouns that are cardinally plural first-person but are sometimes used as singular second-person when used in a certain way. Thus this sense at we also. Quercus solaris (talk) 16:41, 14 January 2025 (UTC). PS: The motivation for using this sense is the desire for teambuilding between the one who provides care and the one who receives it: "you and I, we're on the same side." People complain about it sometimes, chiefly to point out that overdoing it is grating, but it has its place within reason, for interpersonal empathy. Quercus solaris (talk) 16:45, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

For us it should just be a question of usage, whatever the intent and effect, though the intent might be worth noting. DCDuring (talk) 17:40, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Quite true. At Wiktionary it is enough to say the {{label}} that WT currently has there ("colloquial; may sometimes seem patronizing"), and a paragraph of discussion (expository usage notes) is something that would be provided in a work such as GMEU or MWDEU. I predict that someone might come along someday and assert that even WT's {{label}} is too much, but that extreme of parsimony (overparsimony, lol) would be misguided. Quercus solaris (talk) 18:20, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Possible early attestation for cooked (sense 5)

Sense 5 is given as: "(slang) in trouble; in a hopeless situation". I found an attestation from 1971 which appears to match this definition: see the following passage which includes a little context:

1971, Larry Niven, The Fourth Profession:

“Stupid,” I repeated, “and inhospitable. Hospitality counts high with the Monks. You see, we’re cooked either way. Either we’re dumb animals, or we’re guilty of a criminal breach of hospitality. And the Monk ship still needs more light for its lightsail than the sun can put out.”

“So?”

“So the captain uses a gadget that makes the sun explode.”

This is much earlier than the current 2016 quotation, so I'd like to include it if possible, but I'd like to see if it's agreed that this is indeed using the word cooked in this sense. Considering the following sentences it's also possible it's being used in a more literal sense; the Earth will be "cooked" by the heat of the exploding sun, but I am uncertain. Horse Battery (talk) 18:43, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Instances like this one are interesting corner cases — like a falling coin that manages to land on edge. Semantically they often manage to carry some of both senses with them simultaneously, in a way that people can call whatever they want — connotation, echo, allusion, tone, color, whatever one wants to call it. (Thus, in this instance, the conversants are cooked [figuratively] either way because they're soon to be cooked [literally] either way. If that's indeed the situation, then it can be described as a touch of subtle wordplay, or an occurrence of synergy, or "pun not intended", or "pun intended", and only the writer knows for sure about the unintended-versus-intended part, but the reader can guess though [i.e., seems to me likelier intended than unintended, given my corpus results that I mention further below].) In my view, the best advice about this class of citations is twofold: (1) err on the side of excluding them from the entry (where you'd be forced to decide which sense was meant, just by the nature of deciding where to place the citation), but (2) include them in the Citations page (the one that is a subpage of any entry). This points out the citation for future use (it might end up in the entry after all, on another day) but meanwhile it also refrains from asserting the semantic judgment (which can always be made later, and doesn't need to be made today). Glancing over the GBS corpus hits for "he's cooked" from 1940 to 1971 (here) seems to offer some examples of the figurative sense that are both less ambiguous and earlier, so those would be the ones to add to the entry instead of this particular special miracle child. This one is best viewed as a commentworthy curiosity best not ruminated upon for too long. I say that being someone who can easily ruminate on instances way longer than I ought to. Thus perhaps I'm like someone who's covered in burn scars and saying, "I've learned to be more careful with matches" lol. Quercus solaris (talk) 20:27, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

i was the one who added the 2016 quote to that page. i dont think it's particularly new, so more quotes are always welcome.

one thing that does seem new is using cook as a verb, e.g. you really cooked in the debate last night, which could feed into the adj sense, but im pretty sure the adj sense is quite old. —Soap— 21:22, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

Script origin of 靜

It is said to have semantic 青 + phonetic 爭. However, the phonetic of 青 (qing1) seems to be closer to that of 靜 (jing4). And how does "green-blue" mean "peaceful"? Duchuyfootball (talk) 06:56, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

Polish począć also meaning to do?

In the phrase co począć?, począć means something closer to to do or to decide the next course of action (see e.g. [9]https://context.reverso.net/t%C5%82umaczenie/polski-angielski/co+pocz%C4%85%C4%87). This isn't listed in the meanings of począć, nor is there a separate page for the phrase co począć in Wiktionary. How should this be added? (I'm a noob and quite scared of adding stuff just yet.) I'm also not sure if począć can be used on its own (without co) with this meaning other than in this phrase. Uukgoblin (talk) 14:23, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

There's a difference between a translation in context and a sense , WSJP gives a fairly comprehensive list of senses. Clearly the perfective in sense 1 in that collocation is used to mean do, but that doesn't mean the word has a meaning to do. Collocations often don't have the same translation. Vininn126 (talk) 14:25, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

maggoty/maggotish

See this imgur link for a summary of the problem.

While hitting Special:Random, I came across maggotish and found an interesting sense labelled as "dated". I checked out maggoty — linked by the 1st page — out of curiosity, and it had the exact same interesting meaning, but with an obsolete label. I thought it weird that similar words have such different labels — you'd think that if a middle-aged person is familiar with one, they'd be able to easily make out the other one. It's even weirder when "maggoty" is already given as the first sense for "maggotish"; you'd think that that includes the dated sense as well? But then "maggoty" says "maggotish" is altogether obsolete! That was the final nail in the coffin here and now I'm just super confused. Especially since there are no sources in either page substantiating any of the claims made.

Fwiw, I've never seen either word. Of course, the first sense on "maggoty" is the first one that comes to mind when spotting the word, but I haven't come across the words in the wild so I can't easily fix the pages myself. A little help? MedK1 (talk) 23:30, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

I have no doubt that the difference of degree in the labeling (i.e., dated versus archaic versus obsolete) most likely arose simply because different people were judging which label to apply, and each made their best judgment by their own ear. I didn't comb through the histories to confirm that hypothesis, but it's the most likely one. As for which label is best, as a native speaker of AmE, I would boldly assert that for AmE speakers, "obsolete" is best (in both entries), because I highly doubt that more than a small percentage of AmE speakers will have encountered this sense in their own reading and conversations. The degree could be different for native speakers of BrE. Quercus solaris (talk) 01:51, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

PS: It just occurred to me to add here that a label of the type "obsolete outside of [context x]" is entirely conceivable and occasionally necessary. Thus, for example, the language-variety class would be things like "obsolete in some varieties; archaic in others". Another class of instances is the "archaic except in fossil use" class, aka "archaic outside of fossil use". Quercus solaris (talk) 02:06, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

• I often splash dated/archaic/obsolete around half-willy-nilly. For me (Wonderfool, the greatest ever still-active Wiktionarian), something unused since the 1980s is dated. Something unused since the 1880s is archaic, and since 1780s is obsolete. For me, iff we tag sth as "not used anymore", it doesn't matter too much to me which adj. we use. Father of minus 2 (talk) 22:42, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

I've updated both entries, adding a recent cite to each. I've settled on dated, since the cites are recent. Leasnam (talk) 06:14, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

phall

Are the two senses actually different things? The second one suspiciously doesn't name any ingredients. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:84B8:B34B:974E:5467 00:07, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Gesellschaftsherbst

I recently read an article about Herbstraße in Heilbronn, Germany. It was explained there that the name comes from the fact that 'Gesellschaftsherbste' (lit. 'social autumns') used to take place there. I just googled this word but I only found another link of a page from Heilbronn. It only explains that at "Gesellschaftsherbsten" drinking and eating grapes as much as you wanted was free if you paid an entrance fee. This 'Herbst' did not last the entire grape harvest but was only celebrated on one day.

I found out that 'Herbst' is an old-fashioned regional word for 'grape harvest'. But what on earth is a 'Gesellschaftsherbst'? Is it just a party where people who aren't winemakers can celebrate the grape harvest? Or is it something different? RaveDog (talk) 00:25, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

off-side rule

1. (various team sports, now usually written 'offside rule') The rule determining whether a player is in an offside position; that is, an illegal position ahead of the ball, puck, etc.
   1. (soccer) The prohibition of teammates closer to the opponents' goal than the person kicking or throwing the ball unless there are three opponents at least as close to their goal line.

The "soccer" wording has been in place since 2018, so before I change it, and especially since I don't follow soccer – or "foot-ball" as I believe it is sometimes termed in the UK – let's confirm that it should say "two", not "three", right? (Actually the parent definition seems SoP anyway, since it is a "rule" for deciding whether a player is "offside" ... you may as well have a net-cord rule in tennis, or miss rule in snooker, or anything else. However, there are other definitions too, so it would be odd to miss this one. Perhaps sense 1 suffices and the information in sense 1.1 could go to offside. In any case, we need to make sure whether it is three or two. I would also move the whole lot to "offside rule", except I'm not sure about the usual spelling of the other two senses.) Mihia (talk) 20:21, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

D

• (education, chiefly Canada, US) A grade awarded for a class, better than outright failure (which can be F or E depending on the institution) and worse than a C.

I'm puzzled by the "chiefly Canada, US" label and also somewhat by the specificity of the definition. The letters "A" through (traditionally) "F" are commonly used in the UK, and I would imagine "everywhere", for academic grading generally. I'm not 100% sure what it means to grade "a class", or whether we have that exact concept in the UK, or why this one thing has been singled out. I remember when I was at school, in about 300 BC, the teachers used to give us an end-of-term report, of course in those days it was chiselled onto a stone tablet, and we got a grade for each subject. Needless to say, I always got As. Is this what it means to grade "a class"? Anyway, to cut a long story short, would we lose anything of importance, "chiefly Canada, US"-wise, by defining this simply as an "academic grade better than X and worse than Y", as is done with other letters? Mihia (talk) 21:35, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Why is this limited to education? One can find letter grades in all sorts of things. In two minutes I found Grade R in ranking of governmental positions. Report cards are common in many fields. DCDuring (talk) 17:22, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

I think we could say "a grade, especially an academic grade", since academic is the main use. Mihia (talk) 21:48, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Especially is indeed especially useful in generalizing too-narrow definitions. DCDuring (talk) 23:37, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

DIY

I wonder how should this entry and its relatives (do it yourself, do-it-yourself) should be treated, as the abbreviated sense is way more commonly used than the full phrases. it is often used as a clipping of DIY HRT (Wikipedia article) in the trans community. I hesite to create the entry as it feels like it would not pass CFI, so then I want to know how to add this sense to the existing entry. Juwan (talk) 02:38, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

DIY HRT seems like a "common collocation". that could be included among the collocations under that appropriate definitions in the entries for DIY and/or HRT. In general, I wonder why we have separate definitions for some (never all) of the various clippings that are part of the 'grammar' of economy of speech. DCDuring (talk) 17:08, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Definition of Chinese radical 2, 丨

I've been trying to find out what "be through up and down" means; an alleged meaning of the character. Any ideas? Arachnosuchus (talk) 21:51, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

My ponderings on our entry for sheela-na-gig

We say that this is from the Irish for ‘Julia of the breasts’ but this is inconsistent with our entry at Síle which claims it’s the Irish form of Cecilia, not only that but Sile isn’t listed as an alternative form of Julia at Julia (though it does say there that ‘Sheila’ is an informal term for ‘Julia’ over there). Also the Wikipedia page seems less certain than we are about the second part of the etymology, claiming that ‘gig’ and ‘gigh’ are, or were, slang terms for a vulva in Northern England and Ireland respectively (perhaps there is a connection with gee?). It also mentions Sheela-na-gig as the name of a boat and a folk dance. Overlordnat1 (talk) 07:54, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Further musings, this time on dutchie

We claim that this word means ‘joint’ (cannabis cigarette) due to it originally referring to a Dutch Masters cigar but at Wikipedia w:Pass the Dutchie it claims that ‘dutchie’ only came along as a slang term after the song, which is itself based on ‘Pass the Kouchie’ by ‘the Mighty Diamonds’ (I’ve now created an entry for this under the spelling koutchie). Is it not also possible that it is simply a reference to Holland, which is of course famous for smoking green? Overlordnat1 (talk) 09:54, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

From my personal memory, which I know can be flawed, I do remember an interview on a radio station when that song became popular. The band claimed it was an existing slang term from somewhere in Africa that meant cannabis. As to the actual geographical origin, who knows if that's accurate. But I do remember the band saying it was already a well known term in their cultural circles. Killeroonie (talk) 00:25, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I can’t find any mention of ‘dutchie’ meaning ‘cannabis’ prior to 1982 when the song came out or of it meaning ‘Dutch Master cigar’ anywhere, so it’s hard to say with certainty. Cannabis was decriminalised in the Netherlands in 1972 and has been available in coffee shops there since 1976, so it’s possible that a slang term came about in those 6 to 10 years but I can find no evidence of that either. Overlordnat1 (talk) 23:28, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

My memory from the time is basically what it says at Wonkipedia: that the band substituted "dutchie", meaning a cooking pot, an innocuous word, for the offending original word (along with removal of other drug references). I don't remember hearing that it was an existing term for a joint (but of course I could have missed that, or they could have generally denied/not mentioned it in case the song got taken off the radio). Mihia (talk) 22:06, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

parashah plurals order

Fun fact: parashah has the most plural forms in wiktionary (at least for English) at 9!!

The order of the plurals doesn't match the Usage Notes, however.

Is re-ordering the plurals to be consistent with the Usage Notes considered to be a minor edit? Is this something I can change or is there a process?

Thanks!

- Rob Killeroonie (talk) 00:04, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

walrus plural form "walrusses"

How do editors on wiktionary feel about Google N-Gram data? According to this , "walruses" (one s) is much more common than "walrusses" (2 s). Can I add an "uncommon" or "nonstandard" tag to the 2-s form? And what's the guideline for which tag to use?

Also, anyone have a clue what happened in 1826 and again in 1860 that made "walruses" explode in the corpus? :)

- Rob Killeroonie (talk) 00:17, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

what's up with "tallit?"

tallit is the wikipedia entry for a Jewish prayer shawl. This word has 6 separate lemma forms and 24 plural forms for the same thing! I'm no lexicographer nor do I speak Hebrew. But are all these forms really *English* forms, or are many of them direct Hebrew words entered with an English language code? Are these Hebrew declensions, for gender, group, etc? Or is this like the 1500's where everyone spelled words however they felt like that day?

For lemmas we have : tallit, tales, talis, talith, tallis, tallith

and for the plural forms we have:

tallits, tallitot, tallitoth, tallitim, talleysim, tallaisim, talesim, taleysim, talaisim, taleisim, taliths, talithes, talithim, talithot, talithoth, tallises, talleisim, tallisim, tallism, talliths, tallithes, tallithim, tallithot, tallithoth,

All which describe the same Jewish prayer shawl.

I'm taking no action here, I'm just pointing out this embarrassment of riches. :)

- Rob Killeroonie (talk) 02:01, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

This is not really a surprise. (See Hanukkah, chutzpah, chasseneh, etc.) They are simply variant spellings of the English word, which is a borrowing from Hebrew, which famously gets transliterated in unstandardized ways. There are a bit more forms than usual due to three different plural morphemes (one most commonly written -im, one most commonly written -ot, and the standard English -s) combined with various spellings of the lemma (the undotted ת is pronounced t in Modern Hebrew; s in Ashkenazi pronunciations; th in Biblical pronunciations) combined with various representations of the vowels (again, dialect dependent). Hftf (talk) 16:20, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

bżonn

Doubtful on the IPA. Particularly, /nn/. I've heard native speakers say this word and to my mind it sounds much more like /nː/. No particular effort seems to be made to differentiate the two Ns. Even in other Maltese entries with audio provided like nnazzjonalizza, it still sounds like /nː/ to me, sort of akin to the effect of double consonants in Finnic languages. Likewise applies to other doubled consonants, but "nn" is the one that stood out to me. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 15:26, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Pronunciation of cãibra in Portuguese

Since the diphthong(s) in têm is/are fully nasalized (i.e. also the [j̃] is nasalized), I would suspect this to be true also in the diphthong in cãibra, but currently only the /ɐ̃/ is marked as nasalized, the /j/ is not. Also the alternative spellings that have an "m" after the "i" would suggest nasalization of the /j/ as well. Does anyone know more? Mölli-Möllerö (talk) 08:18, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Usage of down

I looked in the page for down and I didn't find any definition that seemed to match with the meaning "missing, going without" as in the phrase We're down a few employees today. I'm curious what part of speech this definition best matches, however. It seems unlike the other prepositional uses of down, but it doesn't seem entirely like an adjective either. How would one best analyze that usage? BillMichaelTheScienceMichael (talk) 14:10, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Adjective sense 2: "At a lower level than before". Your sentence sounds very informal (or maybe more acceptable in American English than British): I would say "down by a few employees". If you accept those as equivalent (maybe ellipsis), then it's the same construction as "the temperature is down by four degrees". 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:E452:8519:9554:64DB 14:15, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

That's helpful. I've found the same thing with the page for up. BillMichaelTheScienceMichael (talk) 14:23, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

In my US idiolect by can be dispensed with. I'm not sure about where it fits along a formal-informal gradient: usable in almost all speech, but perhaps not in formal writings. DCDuring (talk) 14:28, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

I also noticed for up that the definition "at a higher level" is specifically "at a physically higher level." This is distinct from the metaphorical sense, and I'm not sure that sense is represented anywhere in the long list of definitions (please do correct me if I missed it). BillMichaelTheScienceMichael (talk) 14:34, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

up sense 1.4 is "To a higher level of some quantity or notional quantity". This works for stock prices, number of employees, etc. (unless you're really fussy about "quantity" versus "number", in which case make the edit). 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:E452:8519:9554:64DB 14:51, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

PWGmc paidiþi

We show Proto-West Germanic *paidiþi as a feminine i-stem, yet the 2 descendants, Old High German pfeitidi and Old Saxon pēdithi are neuter ja-stems. Shouldn't the reconstructions also be a neuter ja-stem ? Leasnam (talk) 15:07, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

distil and distilled

The rfd of distilled water has highlighted some problems with the relationship of these two words and their senses. For one thing, when distilled modifies a noun, there are two possible ways to interpret it: either the noun is the original thing that has been distilled in order to purify or concentrate it, or the thing is the result, with distillation being part of the process. In other words, you distill water to get "distilled water", but you don't distill a beverage to get a "distilled beverage".

With the first interpretation, "distilled" is a straightforward participle, while the other is decidedly adjective-like. I suppose it's like the difference between a "baked potato" and "baked goods": I notice that "baked" has both a verb-form and an adjective section. Perhaps we need to to the same thing with distilled. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:18, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

In my view, you're right about "distilled". Distilled spirits are spirits that have been distilled from mash. Distilled mash is mash that has been distilled. One distills a set of information, and the subset thus produced is said to have been distilled from it, and to be a distilled subset. Dataset X is filtered data, having come from dataset Y, which was filtered to produce it; dataset Y is a filtered object because it has been filtered — passed through a filter. Natural language uses the word in more than one way. This reminds me of ergativity (the glass broke because someone broke the glass) and of how various verbs for LendBorrow-ing events work (I LendBorrow-ed to him, he LendBorrow-ed from me). Natural language has ways of forcing expression specific to the counterparts, such as the words filtrate versus filtrand and other -ate / -and pairs, but it doesn't always do so. Quercus solaris (talk) 18:56, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

PS: You have to process your raw materials to get processed results, but the raw materials have been processed once you've done so, and thus they have become the processed raw materials. Quercus solaris (talk) 19:05, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

I boldly created the adj POS at distilled § Adjective. Quercus solaris (talk) 19:20, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

• (E/C) If we were to have an adjective section at "distilled" (which, in fact, I was going to suggest myself, apropos of the RFD), I think it might seem unhelpful not to include the "distilled water" sense within it. Yes, "distilled water" means "water that has been distilled", yet you can say "Is this water distilled?", suggesting that adjectival interpretation is also possible. Mihia (talk) 19:21, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

Bumping an older discussion on unattested roots but not obsolete derivatives

I asked about this last month and didn't get an answer. Any new ideas as to the classification? Insaneguy1083 (talk) 12:47, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

downhill

Link to referenced version: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=downhill&oldid=83709780

The comparative and superlative of senses 1 and 2 of adjective "downhill" are said to be "further downhill" and "furthest downhill". It seems to me that this refers to predicative use, e.g. "my house is further downhill", and that the attributive comparative and superlative (such as they exist at all) would be "more/most", e.g. "this is the most downhill course we've ever used" (although this doesn't sound like the greatest English ever to me). But can "further" and "furthest" really modify adjectives? Or is "my house is further downhill" in fact evidence that "downhill" is not truly an adjective in that sentence? Presently we have a de facto policy (I think) that anything following the copula is an adjective (or noun, obviously), but I am perennially uneasy about it in cases such as this. Maybe I have mentioned this before. Any, um, further views? Mihia (talk) 20:44, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

This is related to the difference in conceptions of parts of speech that is seen across dictionaries. AHD and Wiktionary, as of this writing, refuse to admit that afield can be an adjective, but Merriam-Webster holds the view that it can be. One can be afield. One is then in the field. What does it mean to be afield? Is it a way of being (adverb)? Or is it having an attribute (adjective)? One can be far afield, and one can be farther afield. One can be far gone, or one can be farther gone, or further gone. What is it to be so (to be far gone)? A way of being, or an attribute? Perhaps the difference is like the difference in the sound of a tree falling depending on whether there are any ears around to hear it. But to me it usually makes more sense to view it as an adjective than as an adverb. And within that viewpoint, the answer to "can 'further' and 'furthest' really modify adjectives" has to be yes. Quercus solaris (talk) 22:00, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

If "downhill" is an adjective in "my house is further downhill", and assuming we all agree that we cannot say "Jane is further talented" (in a comparative sense), but must say "more talented", then what quality or property of the adjective is it that determines whether we can use "further"? It would be quite a "coincidence" if that property was the property of also being an adverb, would it not. Mihia (talk) 22:42, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

But what about gone, then? Is it not a past-participial adjective? Only an adverb? Quercus solaris (talk) 23:19, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

Oh, I wasn't thinking of past participles when I mentioned adverbs. With past participles, the alternative, if "further"/"furthest" cannot modify an adjective, would have to be verbal, as in the difference between "I was more interested" and "I was further interested". Or "further"/"furthest" could be "sentence adverbial" in some cases. Mihia (talk) 13:22, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

I doubt that locative/temporal terms are the best places to find PoS categories strictly respected. Etymology has consequences. Downhill, downtown, afield, away, apart, along, etc, derive, AFAICT, from prepositional phrases. IMHO, that makes them highly likely to behave like both adverbs and adjectives in different usage, possibly even in the same usage. I wonder whether modification by further/farther/furthest/farthest is just an indication of that what is being modified is a locative. It is possibly also of interest that non-locatives can be modified by less/least, whereas I don't think there is something analogous for locatives. I haven't looked this up in a grammar yet. DCDuring (talk) 15:23, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

I think with these kinds of words, there are uses that are fairly unproblematically adjectival, and uses that are fairly unproblematically adverbial, and then the "problem" cases such as "he is upstairs", which in my view is "obviously" not adjectival, and yet I can't quite get my head around why it is adverbial. In the case of prepositional phrases, we cunningly created a special pseudo-PoS. But unless we create another new "hybrid" PoS for single words, and assuming we aren't going to duck the issue by doing what certain other dictionaries seem to do, by conspicuously avoiding giving these kinds of examples, even though they are a common usage, we do need to come down on one side or the other. Presently this side is largely "adjective", e.g. "Is Mr. Smith in?" is under "adjective", typical for us, whereas this indeed may be "more wrong" than "adverb". I wonder whether we could add some caveat to "adverb" ... e.g. "adverb-locative" (I don't know whether this exactly would make sense as a "thing"). Then we could be sensible and put "he is upstairs" alongside "he went upstairs", both under the same PoS, without the nag of "Why is it an adverb?" Or we could just bite the bullet and call these cases plain adverbs. Mihia (talk) 18:21, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

I can't see calling any of these adverbs when they follow a form of be and, I think, any other copulative verb that they might follow. We might want to get some listing of these locative-type 'adjectives' to help us figure out what to do with them. I haven't found anything very useful yet in CGEL (2005). DCDuring (talk) 03:14, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

As far as I can currently grasp it, the main pro-adverb argument is that e.g. "upstairs" in "He is upstairs" answers a seemingly adverbial question, "Where is he?". The main opposing argument is that the word does not seem to modify anything in the way that we would normally expect of an adverb in this situation. I raised this question a little while ago at BP [10], but only one person ventured an opinion, @Urszag, who said "'Adverb' seems acceptable to me". Most probably I have banged on about this somewhere else before in the more distant past but I can't remember exactly now. Actually, looking at the BP thread again reminds me of the potentially useful term "adverbial complement". How about we exhibit e.g. "He is upstairs" as an adverb, but with the label "as complement"? Mihia (talk) 22:09, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

Pronunciation of nonsarcastically

I’d assume “nonsarcastically” would be pronounced “/nɔnsɑɹkɑstɪk(ə)li/” in English [I don’t know which dialect?] (ignoring the cot-caught merger) since it’s a combination of “non-” and “sarcastically”? 2A00:23C7:AF8B:3501:880A:846B:1D48:F1A3 21:21, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

A different question: is this non- +‎ sarcastically, as the etymology section would have it, or nonsarcastic +‎ -ally, as I’m inclined to see it? I guess the pronunciation is as that of nonsarcastic + /(ə)li/, where the first part would be /nɒn.sɑːˈkæstɪk/ (UK) or /nɒn.sɑɹˈkæstɪk/ (USA).  --Lambiam 22:22, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

Czech -ová

Re the usage note: I've definitely seen a handful of Nyugenová's going around, so the suffix is definitely added to Vietnamese surnames. Not entirely certain, but I think Ngová is another one of those as well. Insaneguy1083 (talk) 12:15, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

steen des aanstoots, Stein des Anstoßes

Do these mean stumbling block? PUC – 13:28, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

The origin is Romans 9:32–33.

In the KJV

Wherefore? Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumblingstone; As it is written, Behold, I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and rock of offence: and whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.”

In the Statenvertaling of 1637:

“Waerom? Om datse niet uyt den geloove, maer als uyt de wercken der Wet. Want sy hebben haer gestoten aen de steen des aenstoots. Gelijck geschreven is, Siet, ick legge in Sion eenen steen des aenstoots, ende een rotze der ergernisse: Ende een yegeijck die in hem gelooft, en sal niet beschaemt worden.”

In the Schlachter Bible:

“Warum? Weil es nicht aus Glauben geschah, sondern aus Werken des Gesetzes. Denn sie haben sich gestoßen an dem Stein des Anstoßes, wie geschrieben steht: »Siehe, ich lege in Zion einen Stein des Anstoßes und einen Fels des Ärgernisses; und jeder, der an ihn glaubt, wird nicht zuschanden werden!«”

(Our article on the German phrase states that it comes from the Luther bible, but the phrase I find there is “steyn des anlauffens”)

This Biblical passage may be the origin of English stumbling block as well, but the sense in which it is used in Dutch and German is different. A “stumbling block” is a potential impediment to success. A “steen des aanstoots / Stein des Anstoßes” is something people (are reported to) take offence at.  --Lambiam 21:40, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

up

Adverb:

• (US, bartending) Without additional ice.

  A Cosmopolitan is typically served up.

I'm not familiar with this sense. Can it definitely be adverbial? The example looks suspiciously as if it might be adjectival, as in e.g. "salad is usually served cold". (We do also already have an existing adjectival sense.) Mihia (talk) 15:12, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

I think it is very similar to “Real cowboys know how to rope, ride a horse and drink whisky straight”, which use we classify as an adjective. A difference is (I think) that straight as relating to drinks can also be used as a prepositive attribute. In “You must tell the story straight”, it is IMO an adverb, though, so things look a bit blurry, even though I’ve not had any whisky.  --Lambiam 21:53, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

OK, fair enough then, I'll leave it alone. Mihia (talk) 21:25, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

handlebar/handlebars

Wondering how we should treat these - the current approach of having the lemma at "handlebar" but saying "chiefly in the plural" seems unsatisfactory. I think it's a plurale tantum akin to trousers - a bike typically only has one bar to use as a handle, but because it's bifurcated, the plural makes sense. But compared to the rare trouser, "handlebar" seems relatively common and I wouldn't consider "hold the handlebar" a mistake as I would "put on your trouser". Smurrayinchester (talk) 09:18, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

I agree that the presentation of this is not ideal. "handlebar = The bar used to steer a bicycle etc." implies that only one bar is needed per e.g. bicycle, in which case "handlebars" would mean more than one steering mechanism, which needn't be the case (although could be, if multiple bicycles were referred to). So what is a "handlebar"? References to "left/right handlebar" of a bike suggest that it can mean "half a full bar", but other times it seems to mean the whole bar ... Mihia (talk) 21:26, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

Compare also the common advice to people learning to ride a bike that they should hold “both handlebars”.^[11]  --Lambiam 21:59, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

Plural form of sməxʷə́yu?

i question is there a plural form of sməxʷə́yu, or know as earthquake in Klallam, its a question that only i was thinking, so someone might answer that question, Thank you. Nail123Real (talk) 15:36, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

cám ơn

Middle Vietnamese. Verification of its Middle Vietnamese pronunciation needed. --ChemPro (talk) 19:45, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

Which sense of zone is this?

Steve Bannon is regularly cited as having said, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Which sense of zone is this?  --Lambiam 20:36, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

in

Link to referenced version: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=in&oldid=83748266

I am a big fan of grouping senses where appropriate, but I have never understood the purpose of the heading "Used to indicate limit, qualification, condition, or circumstance", or how the senses under it are usefully related. I am thinking of doing away with this grouping, but since clearly some thought went into originally creating it, I am raising it here in case anyone sees value in it. If so, I'll leave it alone. Mihia (talk) 20:57, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

pry as short for probably

This seems widespread on social media. See here for just one phrase. My comment on talk:prolly back in 2021 showed that I'd heard it pronounced as pry, so I would assume this is a shortened pronunciation along the lines of prolly, but it's occurred to me that what I heard could have been a mistake, and I no longer remember who these people were or even if it was more than one person. I do remember that they were teenagers or younger, so I'd figured it was a generational thing at first. Now I think it's in widespread use and we're just missing a listing. I would add that, but I want to be sure of the pronunciation first. Can anyone confirm that it's pronounced as pry and not just a typing shortcut? Thanks. —Soap— 21:36, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

Do you mean, pronounced /pɹaɪ/ with a spelling pronunciation, like the verb pry, using a diphthong entirely absent from the common pronunciation /ˈpɹɒbli/?  --Lambiam 22:08, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

well im just being overly cautious here since its better to not list something than to list it incorrectly. but yes .... i think the spoken pronunciation came first, so it's an ordinary word just like prolly, not a spelling pronunciation. pry as /pɹaɪ/ is pretty close to what we'd get taking the elision of prolly one step further. i've been off of streaming social media for years now and i dont even go out in public that much. but if it's so widespread on social media i'd assume people would be hearing it in person too. —Soap— 22:32, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

fiddle around

1. (intransitive) Synonym of waste time.

   Stop fiddling around and do your job.

2. (intransitive, or transitive followed by "with") To mess around (with); to muck about (with); to tinker (with).

   Don't fiddle around with those cables or you'll electrocute yourself.

   I've been fiddling around all morning, trying to get this old lawnmower to work.

Is sense 1 really a separate sense? Or is wasting time in fact just a likely by-product of doing the kinds of activity described in sense 2? Mihia (talk) 20:59, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

They don’t seem separate to me, by all means merge them, AFAIC. Overlordnat1 (talk) 00:00, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

Agreed that it needs work and parts need moving. I respect the sense differentiation of "idle" ("do nothing; do next to nothing") versus "tinker" ("try to fix something"). But the alleged vi/vt distinction that someone was after (but did not capture correctly — and the mower ux is not different from the job ux) is that one can do the action (v.i.) by itself or one can do the action in a way focused semantically on a grammatical object's referent; but that doesn't make the verb a v.t. grammatically — it only makes it a v.i. that can take a PP as a complement. There is something about such a thing that feels like v.t.-ness at an underlying level (of mentalese or whatever the concept of mentalese tries to get at), and perhaps it is truly connected to v.t.-ness at that level, whereas the v.i.-ness is maybe more of a formality than an essence. One might fuck with (not formally a v.t.) this line of thought (not formally a d.o.) at one's leisure. No doubt the makers of CamGEL will have better command of suitable metalanguage to discuss it than I do. Someday I'll get around to reading all of their magnum opus. At my present rate, I might finish that goal before I die, maybe. Quercus solaris (talk) 03:41, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

Update — I was off-track above. It is possible to categorize certain verb+"with" combinations as v.t.; for example, fuck (v.i.) and fuck with + d.o. (v.t.), stand (v.i.) and stand with + d.o. (v.t.), mess (v.i.) and mess with + d.o. (v.t.). From that viewpoint, we should thus also codify the distinction of fuck around (v.i.) and fuck around with + d.o. (v.t.), mess around (v.i.) and mess around with + d.o. (v.t.), fiddle around (v.i.) and fiddle around with + d.o. (v.t.), and suchlike. Quercus solaris (talk) 18:59, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

We do have separate entries for fiddle and fiddle with (albeit in a bit of a mess that I have been trying to clean up). I wonder whether separate fiddle around and fiddle around with might be a bit much though. In fact you could argue even that fiddle around is unnecessary as it is "fiddle" + fairly generic sense of "around". Mihia (talk) 21:47, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

I know what you mean. With all the many members of this class, there is some kind of spectrum going on under the hood, which a codification would be attempting to discretize. Quercus solaris (talk) 22:38, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

digest

For such an everyday term, the biological definition here is poor. 213.143.51.30 22:34, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

It is perhaps a bit long-winded, also senses 2 and 6 are basically the same, as far as I can see, apart from transitivity and could be merged. Overlordnat1 (talk) 23:59, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

fiddle

When people say "fiddle" as an interjection, e.g. "Oh, fiddle!", is it determinate whether they mean "fiddlesticks" or "fuck", or indeed is "fiddlesticks" itself now more commonly a euphemism for the latter? Mihia (talk) 22:57, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

why isn't there a page of günlər or days in azerbaijani, its in azerbaijani dictionarys

i need to know, and someone might make a page of it someday, thank you - Nail123Real (talk) 14:53, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

There could be a multitude of reasons why.

1. Editors, who are volunteers, remember, haven't gotten to it yet as they have been adding other words.
2. It might not meet our WT:CFI. A word existing in an "official" dictionary doesn't always mean it's addable to Wiktionary. At that, Azerbaijani is a WT:WDL.

You can also instead just add it to WT:Requested entries (Azerbaijani). Vininn126 (talk) 16:10, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

thanks, i added that to requested entries - Nail123Real (talk) 16:16, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

I strongly urge you to become familiar with our Criteria for inclusion (CFI), including what kinds of multiword entries can exist etc. This determines what pages can exist or not. Vininn126 (talk) 16:20, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

alright, just be patient, i would become a bit good user in the future, thank you - Nail123Real (talk) 17:28, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

It worked: now there is a page for Azerbaijani günlər.  --Lambiam 19:08, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

ok cool Nail123Real (talk) 19:55, 31 January 2025 (UTC)